Microsoft Office Without a Subscription: 2026 UK Buyer’s Guide

Microsoft 365 Personal now costs £84.99 a year in the UK — up 42% from £59.99 in January 2025, with Microsoft pointing to the Copilot AI it bundled into the apps. If you don’t want AI in your documents, you pay for it anyway. The question a lot of people are asking is whether they can get Office without subscribing to any of it. They can. Microsoft still sells Office as a one-time purchase, and has done continuously throughout the subscription era.

What perpetual Office actually gives you

A perpetual Office licence installs on one device and stays there. No renewal, no billing date to forget, no price increase on your next anniversary. According to Microsoft’s own FAQ, Office 2024 is a one-time purchase that comes with classic versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for one PC or Mac, and does not include any of the services that come with a Microsoft 365 subscription.

The current edition is Office 2024. It ships with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The Home & Business and Professional Plus editions add Outlook. VBA is fully supported — Microsoft explicitly confirmed this for both Office 2024 and LTSC 2024. Installation on Windows uses Click-to-Run; on Mac, the standard Apple Package (.pkg) format.

What you give up — and what that actually means

The differences between perpetual Office and a subscription are real. Most of them won’t affect most users.

A few of these deserve comment. The Copilot row is the reason the subscription got more expensive. Since January 2025, Microsoft 365 Personal has included Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote, rationed to 60 AI credits a month for the subscription owner. Heavier use means upgrading to Microsoft 365 Premium at £189.99 a year. If you have no interest in AI, there’s no cheaper way out: the no-AI “Classic” plans aren’t available to new customers. Perpetual Office has no Copilot — and no AI surcharge built into the price.

Co-authoring is a genuine loss if you’re editing shared documents with colleagues in real time. If your workflow is solo or you collaborate through tracked changes and email, it won’t matter. The OneDrive storage is similarly replaceable — Microsoft 365 Basic gives you 100 GB of OneDrive for £1.99 a month (£19.99 a year), which still leaves you well ahead of a full subscription cost.

Feature updates are worth one honest acknowledgement. Office 2024 is locked in time. The feature set is what it is at release. For a team building out SharePoint workflows or using AI writing assistance daily, that’s a real constraint. For the majority of users running Word, Excel, and Outlook day-to-day, the 2024 feature set is more than sufficient — and most of the features people actually use have been stable across releases for years.

Five years of M365 vs buying once

Microsoft 365 Personal is £84.99 a year. That’s £425 over five years — and that figure assumes no further price increases, despite the 2025 hike being 42% and commercial plans seeing another round of increases in July 2026.

Office Pro Plus 2024 is £79 once. The five-year maths requires no further explanation.

The crossover happens before the end of year one. From that point forward, every M365 renewal is money spent on software you’d already own outright with a perpetual licence.

Which version to buy

There are meaningful differences between the available perpetual editions. The choice comes down to what apps you need, how you want to activate, and whether you’re on a PC or Mac.

This is the most complete perpetual Office available for Windows. Installation goes through the Office Deployment Tool rather than setup.microsoft.com, and activation is by product key — no Microsoft account is required or attached to the licence. For anyone who objects to account-linked software on principle, that distinction matters. It also makes deployment on managed machines significantly simpler.

Home & Business 2024 activates through your Microsoft account via setup.microsoft.com — the same process as any retail Office purchase. The licence attaches to your account, which makes it easy to recover if you reinstall Windows. The more familiar activation route for home users.

The only case for choosing 2021 over 2024 is Publisher. Microsoft retired Publisher in October 2026: it has been removed from Microsoft 365 and was never included in Office 2024. A perpetual Office 2021 licence is now the only way to keep opening and editing .pub files in Publisher itself. Go in with your eyes open — the software still works, but it no longer receives security patches. For everyone else, buy 2024.

Mac

Perpetual Office for Mac follows the same logic. One purchase, one device. The Mac edition does not include Access — everything else is there. Installation uses the standard Apple Package format, the same as previous Mac Office releases.

Office 2024 for Mac supports the three most recent versions of macOS. As new macOS releases arrive, Microsoft drops the oldest supported version and picks up the newest. Support runs to October 2029.

If you only need one application

Not everyone needs the full suite. Standalone Word or Excel licences are available for both Windows and Mac at £54 each — still a one-time purchase, still the full desktop application, still supported to October 2029.

Frequently asked questions