.NET 8 LTS ends November 10, 2026, and PowerShell with it

Six Microsoft platforms reach end of support on November 10, 2026. Individually, none of them is dramatic. Together they are the largest single-day application-platform expiry in this cycle, and the reason it gets missed is a three-letter label that reads as reassurance.

The date, and what is on it

That 6:59:59 AM is Pacific time expressed as the instant support lapses, so every one of these is end of day November 10, not November 11. November 10 is the second Tuesday of the month — the ordinary shape of a Microsoft end-of-support date, and a useful check on any date you decode from one of these tables.

PowerShell does not have its own lifecycle

The non-obvious item on that list is PowerShell, and the reason it is there is worth understanding because it generalises. PowerShell is built on .NET and inherits .NET's support lifecycle. PowerShell 7.4 is the LTS release built on .NET 8, so it expires when .NET 8 LTS expires.

You can watch the same mechanism in the successor generation: PowerShell 7.6 (LTS) and .NET 10 both carry a lifecycle cell of 11/15/2028 6:59:59 AM — end of day November 14, 2028. Same day, again. That is the dependency showing through, not a scheduling coincidence.

The Windows 11 edition trap is nearly a year wide

Three Windows 11 dates land within about twelve months of each other, and the version number alone does not tell you which one applies:

• Version 24H2, Home and Pro — October 13, 2026
• Version 23H2, Enterprise and Education — November 10, 2026
• Version 24H2, Enterprise and Education — October 12, 2027

So a fleet on 24H2 might have until 2027 or might have expired in October 2026, depending purely on edition. And a managed Enterprise fleet that deferred feature updates is very likely sitting on 23H2 right now, which is the November date. Never plan against "Windows 11 24H2" without naming the edition — the same version number carries two dates a year apart.

The IoT Enterprise line matters more than its share of the estate suggests. Thin clients, kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, medical carts and machine-attached workstations run it, and those are exactly the devices that never appear in a compliance report because nobody enrolled them.

.NET 8 is the long pole, and "LTS" is why

LTS means three years. .NET 8 shipped on November 14, 2023, and three years is up. The label is accurate; the problem is that it reads as safe and quietly leaves the risk register.

That has a second-order effect worth naming: LTS releases are chosen precisely by teams that wanted stability, so they accumulate the most dependent code and are the most expensive to move. Note that .NET 9, the Standard Term Support release, ends on exactly the same day despite being a year newer — being on the newer version buys nothing here.

Moving from net8.0 to net10.0 is a code change and a regression-test cycle. For one internal application that is a short project. Across an estate the long pole is usually not your code at all — it is waiting for a vendor to certify their product on .NET 10, which is a lead time you do not control and cannot compress. That conversation belongs in September, not October.

Microsoft's own pages disagree about .NET 9

Worth flagging, because you may be quoted the other number. Microsoft's Ending support in 2026 summary page lists .NET 9 under May 12, 2026. The .NET product lifecycle page gives 11/11/2026 6:59:59 AM, and the .NET team's own support policy page also says November. Two Microsoft sources against one.

The product lifecycle page is the authoritative one, so the date is November 10, 2026. The general lesson is more useful than the specific one: that summary page is a curated list, not a complete inventory. Several items with hard dates in this window — including Configuration Manager 2503 on September 30, 2026 — do not appear on it at all.

What to do with the ten weeks before September ends

1. Inventory by target framework, not by application name. Search your repositories for net8.0 and net9.0 target frameworks. The list will be longer than the list of applications you think you have.
2. Ask every ISV in writing when they will support .NET 10. This is the longest lead time in the whole exercise and it is the one you do not control. A vague answer in September is itself the finding.
3. Find the PowerShell. Scheduled tasks, runbooks, Intune remediation scripts, anything calling Graph or Exchange Online. Ownership matters more than count — an unowned script is a decision, not a task.
4. Establish the Windows 11 edition and version per device, not per fleet. The answer decides whether your date is October 2026, November 2026 or October 2027.
5. Move .NET and PowerShell together, onto .NET 10 and PowerShell 7.6 (LTS). They share an end date of November 14, 2028 — keep that pairing deliberately rather than letting them drift apart and doing this twice.
6. Write down what you are choosing not to move, and why. "We accept this runs unsupported" is a defensible position with a named owner. "Nobody checked" is not.

The 30-second version

• Six Microsoft platforms end support on November 10, 2026 — end of day, not November 11.
• .NET 8 is LTS, and that is the problem — the label reads as safe, so it leaves the risk register.
• PowerShell 7.4 LTS dies the same day because it is built on .NET 8. The successors, .NET 10 and PowerShell 7.6, share an end date too — that is the dependency, not a coincidence.
• Windows 11 has three dates spanning a year, separated by edition. 24H2 Home/Pro is October 2026; 23H2 Enterprise is November 2026; 24H2 Enterprise is October 2027.
• The long pole is ISV certification on .NET 10, and you do not control it.

Related reading

• The other .NET date people conflate with this one, on video: .NET Framework 4.6.2 End of Support: January 12, 2027 (A different product from .NET 8, on a different date. You are one row from supported.)
• The server-side expiry on the same estate: Windows Server 2016 end of support: ESU or modernize? — January 12, 2027, and it takes the management plane with it.
• The October cluster that precedes this one: The October 13, 2026 Microsoft retirement cluster.
• Service detail: Windows Server end-of-support consulting — inventory, sequencing and a dated findings record, scoped fixed-fee.

Sources and further reading

• Microsoft Learn — .NET and .NET Core lifecycle (.NET 8, .NET 9 and .NET 10 cells)
• Microsoft Learn — PowerShell lifecycle (7.4, 7.5 and 7.6 cells)
• Microsoft Learn — Windows 11 Enterprise and Education lifecycle
• Microsoft Learn — Windows 11 IoT Enterprise lifecycle
• Microsoft Learn — Ending support in 2026 — the summary page, which is a curated list rather than a complete inventory and which carries the conflicting .NET 9 date noted above