Microsoft Office 2016 vs 2024: Should You Upgrade in 2026

Office 2016 reached the end of its support life on 14 October 2025. No more security patches, no more fixes — and its supported connection to Microsoft 365 email and cloud services ended two years before that. If you’re still running it, the question isn’t whether to upgrade. It’s which route costs you least.

Where Office 2016 stands in 2026

Microsoft’s lifecycle records are unambiguous. Extended support for every perpetual edition of Office 2016 — Home & Student, Home & Business, Professional, Professional Plus — ended on 14 October 2025. Since that date, newly discovered vulnerabilities in Word, Excel and Outlook 2016 stay unpatched. Office documents remain one of the most common malware delivery routes there is, which makes an unpatched Office suite a strange thing to open email attachments with.

The lesser-known date is the one that bites first. Microsoft ended supported connectivity between Office 2016 and Microsoft 365 services — Exchange Online mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint — on 10 October 2023. Outlook 2016 may still connect to a modern mailbox today. Tomorrow’s server-side change doesn’t have to account for it, and increasingly doesn’t. If your Outlook has developed mysterious sync problems or password prompts that won’t go away, this is usually why.

The suite itself still opens and still edits documents. Nobody is switching it off remotely. But it’s now unsupported software with a degrading connection to the services most people use it with.

What nine years of updates actually adds up to

Office 2024 rolls up everything Microsoft shipped across 2019, 2021 and 2024. Coming from 2016, the jump is bigger than any single version comparison suggests — we covered the smaller step in the Office 2019 vs 2024 guide. The differences that matter day to day:

For most people the Excel column is the whole argument. XLOOKUP alone retires a decade of VLOOKUP workarounds, and dynamic arrays change how spreadsheets get built. Everything else is a bonus.

One honest caveat: Office 2016 Professional included Publisher, and Office 2024 doesn’t — Microsoft dropped it from the suite entirely. If you actively use Publisher, Office Professional Plus 2021 still includes it, but read the Publisher retirement guide first — Microsoft retires the application in October 2026, so that’s a bridge, not a destination.

What the upgrade costs

Microsoft’s preferred answer to an old Office is a Microsoft 365 subscription at £79.99 every year. A perpetual Office Professional Plus 2024 licence costs £79 once. The subscription is more expensive by the end of year one, and the gap widens by another £79.99 every year after that.

Cumulative cost over five years. The perpetual licence costs less from the first year — there is no break-even point to wait for.

The subscription earns its keep only if you want continuous feature updates and the bundled 1 TB of OneDrive storage. If you’ve been happy running the same Office for nine years, you are not that customer. The full comparison is in Office 2024 vs Microsoft 365.

Coming from Home & Business 2016? The like-for-like upgrade is Office Home & Business 2024 at £149 — same app set, activates through your Microsoft account, and the licence moves with the account rather than the machine. But look at Pro Plus 2024 before you buy out of habit: it costs less and adds Access and Teams. The only thing H&B does that Pro Plus doesn’t is account-portable licensing. If that’s not a feature you’d have asked for, don’t pay the premium for it — the H&B vs Professional Plus comparison covers the decision in full.

Doing the upgrade without creating a mess

Two Office generations don’t coexist reliably on one machine — 2016 was often an MSI-era installation, and remnants of it will trip up the 2024 installer in ways that produce spectacularly unhelpful error messages. Twenty years of support calls says: remove first, install second.

1. Back up your Outlook data file (PST) and any custom templates. Your documents aren’t touched by any of this, but Outlook archives live locally and deserve a copy.
2. Uninstall Office 2016 completely — Microsoft’s Support and Recovery Assistant does a cleaner job than Control Panel, which tends to leave remnants behind.
3. Restart, then install Office Professional Plus 2024 and activate with your key. No Microsoft account required for Pro Plus — it binds to the machine.
4. Reconnect Outlook to your mailbox and point it at your backed-up PST. Modern authentication works properly again, which usually kills the password-prompt loop on the spot.

Your key arrives by email the moment you order, it’s saved to your account, and it’s covered by a lifetime warranty. If a reinstall is needed in 2031, the key will still be there.

On a Mac?

Office 2016 for Mac has been out of support since October 2020 — a full six years now. The upgrade path is Office Home & Business 2024 for Mac, the only perpetual suite on macOS.

Frequently asked questions