Microsoft's guidance: convert your files before 1 October 2026. This is Microsoft's own published date, stated here as honest context — not a countdown to a sale.

If you have found this page, you probably have a folder — or a filing cabinet's worth of network share — full of .pub files. Parish magazines. School prospectuses. Menus, price lists, order of service booklets, membership leaflets, a decade of newsletters. And you have read somewhere that Publisher is going away.

Let's answer it properly and calmly, including the parts that are less alarming than they sound.

Nothing is deleted, and nobody comes for your files

Retirement is a decision about software and support. It is not a decision about your documents. On 2 October 2026 your .pub files will be byte-for-byte what they were the day before. No server reaches into your machine and removes them.

Microsoft's published guidance is that you should convert your existing files to another format before 10/1/2026, because after that date you will no longer be able to open or edit them in Publisher. That is the real substance of it: the reader is going away, not the book.

What actually catches people out is much more ordinary than a deadline:

  • A new laptop arrives, and Publisher is simply not one of the apps that installs any more.
  • The Microsoft 365 subscription renews and Publisher is no longer part of it.
  • The one PC in the office that still had Publisher on it gets wiped, replaced or retired.
  • The volunteer or colleague who "did the newsletter" moves on, and their machine goes with them.

Any one of those is the day a .pub quietly becomes a file that nothing on the premises will open. The retirement date does not cause that; it just makes it far more likely, far sooner, and for far more people at once.

Who is affected, and how much

It depends entirely on which sort of Publisher you have, and this distinction matters more than anything else on this page.

If you use Publisher through a Microsoft 365 subscription

This is the group with a genuine cut-off. Publisher stops being part of the subscription, and a subscription-installed copy is not something you can keep running indefinitely on your own terms. If this is you, converting your back catalogue before the date is a real, practical piece of housekeeping rather than a precaution.

If you own a perpetual copy — Publisher 2021, 2019, 2016 and so on

You bought it outright and it is installed on a machine you control. It will still launch on 2 October 2026, and the day after. It will simply be unsupported: no more updates, no more fixes, and no assurance that it survives the next Windows or Office upgrade. That gives you breathing room, not immunity — and it makes you the most useful person in your organisation, because you are the one who can still do the conversion work.

If you own a perpetual copy, do the conversion now while you still have the easiest tool for the job. A working Publisher install is the single best thing you can have in front of you, and it is the one asset that quietly disappears over the next couple of years without anyone noticing.

The distinction that decides your whole plan: reading versus editing

Almost every muddle we see comes from treating these as one job. They are two.

Archival is about being able to read a document in ten years: the 2014 newsletter, the fee schedule that a query is about, the safeguarding leaflet somebody has asked to see. For this, PDF is the right answer and has been for two decades. You are preserving a record.

Migration is about being able to make next month's edition. That means rebuilding your working templates in whatever you use going forward — Word, PowerPoint, Canva, Affinity Publisher, Scribus, whatever suits your budget and your volunteers. You are moving a workflow.

These need different work and different amounts of it. A charity with 900 old newsletters and three live templates has 900 archival files and three migration jobs — and if you try to rebuild all 903 you will give up in week two. Sort the pile first.

Your options, honestly — including the free ones

1. Save as PDF from inside Publisher (free, best fidelity)

If you have a running Publisher, open the file and use File → Save As, choosing PDF. Nothing else will match it for accuracy, because it is the program that made the file rendering the file. It is free, it is exact, and it is the correct answer for anything you only need to read or print. The only problem is scale: it is roughly a minute a file, which is fine for twelve and unworkable for two thousand.

2. Microsoft's PowerShell script for bulk conversion (free)

Microsoft publishes a sample script, Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1, that drives Publisher automatically over a whole folder, including subfolders. It is genuinely free and it is the right tool if you have hundreds or thousands of files. Two honest caveats: it needs a working, licensed Publisher installed on the machine, and it assumes you are comfortable with PowerShell execution policies and file paths — several people in Microsoft's own Q&A forums have described that setup as a real afternoon's work. We walk through it properly in our guide to bulk converting .pub files.

3. Free desktop apps that read .pub (free, partial)

LibreOffice Draw includes a Publisher import filter and is free on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is well worth trying, and for simple documents it does a decent job. Be prepared for the results to vary with complexity: substituted fonts, shifted text frames and master-page elements are the common differences people report. Try it on one representative file before you plan a whole project around it.

4. A local, read-only recovery tool (what we make)

Publisher Rescue is built for the case where you no longer have Publisher at all — which is precisely the situation the retirement creates. It reads your own .pub files directly on your own computer, without needing Publisher installed, and gets the content out: your text into a Word .docx plus RTF and plain text; the pictures stored in the file as standard image files (including WMF and EMF metafiles decompressed properly); a PDF of the recovered content ending in a notes page listing what could not be rebuilt; the page size and the number of pages actually rebuilt, which is the number of layout pages in that PDF rather than a claim about the original; and a plain-language and JSON report of exactly what was and was not recovered.

Honest scope, so there are no surprises. It recovers content, not page design. The .docx is text-faithful — your words come through reliably — but it is not a replica of the original page, and the words arrive as a plain flow: across the six genuine Publisher files this build has been run against, no character or paragraph format table could be decoded, so sizes, bold, italic and colour are not carried over and no font name was reported. The PDF is not a reproduction of your design either — fonts, sizes, bold/italic and colours are not reproduced, and WordArt, master-page artwork, colour schemes, shape fills and table cell layout are not rebuilt; the PDF states that on every page and lists what it left out on its own notes page. Coverage is Publisher 2000–2019, and the tool names the format family a file was saved in rather than the exact release — Publisher 2002 through 2019 all write the same version marker. The Publisher 2000 path is in the build but no genuine Publisher 2000 file has been through it, and its older page-layout directory is not read; Publisher 97/98 and earlier are a different format and are reported as out of scope rather than mis-converted. The report states all of this per file.

Your original is only ever read, never written to: the report records a SHA-256 checksum of the source taken before the scan and again afterwards, both printed in full so you can compare them yourself.

Supported operating systems: Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit), and macOS 10.15 or later on Intel and Apple silicon Macs. One purchase covers both — you get each download.

Saving the recovered files is what the £79 licence unlocks.

Download the free preview

A sensible plan, whatever route you pick

  1. Find everything. Search your drives and shares for *.pub and write down how many there are. You cannot preserve what you have not counted.
  2. Split the pile in two — archive-only versus still-live templates. This is the step that makes the job finite.
  3. Work from copies. Never let any conversion tool, ours included, be pointed at your only copy.
  4. PDF the archive pile while a Publisher install still exists somewhere you can reach.
  5. Get the raw ingredients out too — the text and the images — because a PDF is lovely to read and awkward to reuse. That is the part people regret skipping.
  6. Rebuild only the live templates in whatever you are moving to.

We would genuinely rather you did all of this with free tools in September and never needed us. Losing the records is the only bad outcome here.