Microsoft's published end-of-support date for InfoPath was 14 July 2026. Stated as fact for planning purposes — not as a countdown to anything.

The facts, before the workarounds

  • InfoPath 2013 was the last version. There is no InfoPath 2016, 2019, 2021 or 2024. Microsoft did not include it in Office 2016 or anything after, so installing a current Office will not give it to you.
  • The standalone download was licence-gated. InfoPath 2013 was published as a standalone installer, but obtaining it was tied to an active Office 365 ProPlus subscription. It was never a free public download.
  • Support ended on 14 July 2026. The client is out of support, and InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Online reached the same date.
  • Two applications, not one. InfoPath Designer builds templates; InfoPath Filler opens and completes them. People trying to read old forms usually need Filler, and many installations only ever had Designer.

One thing we will not help with. Search results for this question are full of sites offering "free downloads" of Office applications. Do not use them. Installing unlicensed software from an unknown source onto a machine that is about to handle HR or financial records is a bad trade at any price, and it is not a route we will point anybody at. If InfoPath is legitimately available to your organisation, it comes from Microsoft or your licensing reseller — ask them.

The legitimate places it may still exist in your estate

1. A machine that already has it

The most common find. Somebody in finance, HR or IT has an older workstation, or a virtual machine kept alive for exactly this reason. Look before you spend money. If you find one, treat it as a resource with a shelf life, not as a plan.

2. Filler as a feature of an existing InfoPath install

If InfoPath 2013 is on a machine but only Designer appears, Filler may simply not be enabled. In Control Panel → Programs and Features, select Microsoft InfoPath 2013, choose Change, then Add or Remove Features, and set InfoPath Filler to run from your computer. Costs nothing and takes a couple of minutes.

3. Your own licensing channel

If your organisation held Office 365 ProPlus or a volume licence in that era, the installer may still be reachable through your admin centre or your reseller. That is a question for them. Whether it is worth doing is a separate question, addressed below.

4. Old media you already own

Volume-licence media and ISOs kept by IT departments are a legitimate source for software you are licensed for. Your licensing terms decide what you may install, so check them rather than assuming.

Before you go to the trouble: is it the right goal?

Reinstating InfoPath is worth it for one situation and not really for the others.

Worth it when: you have live forms still in daily use and you need them working for a few more months while a replacement is built. That is a genuine bridge, and a bridge is a fine thing to build.

Probably not worth it when: what you actually need is to read historical records. In that case reinstating an out-of-support application is a lot of work to acquire a new dependency — one that has to be maintained, patched by nobody, and kept alive on hardware that will eventually be replaced. It also does not, by itself, produce anything an auditor can open. You would still have to export.

Put plainly: if the objective is "these records must still be readable in eight years", the answer cannot be "keep a 2013 application running for eight years".

Reading your forms without InfoPath — what is genuinely possible

This is the part that surprises people, and it is the reason not to panic about the install question at all.

InfoPath was built on open standards. A filled-in record is a plain XML file. A template is a Microsoft Cabinet (CAB) archive containing open XML parts — a manifest, an XSD schema listing every field, and XSL view transforms describing the layout. There is no proprietary binary container and no encryption. So:

  • Open a record in a text editor. The values are right there, in readable XML. Free, immediate, and often enough to answer the question somebody actually asked.
  • Extract a template with any CAB-capable tool. expand MyForm.xsn -F:* C:\out on Windows, cabextract on macOS or Linux. Then read the schema to find out what the field names mean. Full walkthrough here.
  • Script the folder. A short PowerShell or Python script turns a directory of records into a CSV. The routes and the traps are written up here.
  • Use a reader built for the format. Our answer, below, for when the manual routes stop scaling.

None of the first three requires an InfoPath licence, a Microsoft 365 subscription, or anybody's permission. They are just files.

What we make, and what it does not do

XSN Rescue reads .xsn templates and filled-in .xml records directly, on your own machine, with no InfoPath and no Microsoft 365 licence involved. It produces the field catalogue from the template's schema, every recovered value from each record with repeating sections handled by indexed field paths, attachments decoded from base64 back into real files, and exports to CSV, JSON and HTML plus a self-contained archival PDF per record. Every run writes an inventory of the folder and a recovery report saying what happened to each file.

The four things it is built around: files are opened read-only, with source_modified: false recorded per file so you can show the originals were untouched; there is an audit trail in the recovery report, with nothing skipped silently; it runs entirely locally, no upload and no account, the recovery engine containing no networking code (the app itself goes online only to check your licence key); and it is bought once for the organisation rather than rented for the privilege of reading your own records.

Its honest limits. It recovers data and static layout. It does not execute or recover code-behind, external data connections or user-role logic — so if what you need is a working interactive form rather than the records inside it, this is not the tool and reinstating InfoPath or rebuilding on a modern platform is your route. Digital signatures are surfaced as fields but not cryptographically verified. The archival PDF uses a standard Latin font, so characters outside that set are marked [U+XXXX] and counted, while the JSON export keeps the exact text.

Platform. XSN Rescue runs on macOS (10.15 or later, Intel and Apple silicon, one universal download) and on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit). Both are the same version and the same price — one purchase covers both. There is no Linux build, and we are not giving a date for one; on Linux, the free routes above are your path, and they work.

The short version

  1. InfoPath 2013 was the last version; it is not in Office 2016 or later; support ended 14 July 2026.
  2. Check for an existing install, and check whether Filler can simply be enabled on it. Both are free.
  3. If you need it legitimately, ask Microsoft or your reseller. Do not download Office from a third-party site.
  4. If your goal is reading historical records, you probably do not need InfoPath at all — the files are open XML and a CAB archive.
  5. Whatever route you take, export the data into open formats. That is the step that ends the problem instead of postponing it.