Your Office licence has expired — what your options are

The message "Your subscription has expired" or "Your Office licence has expired" usually appears after a year with Microsoft 365 — or after the trial period on a new computer. Before you pay for anything, it is worth knowing exactly what has stopped.

The important distinction

There are two completely different models and they are constantly confused:

• Microsoft 365 is a subscription. You pay monthly or annually. When you stop paying, the applications switch to read-only mode.
• Office 2016 / 2019 / 2021 is a perpetual licence. You pay once and it stays yours. It does not expire.

If you see "expired", it is almost certainly a subscription or a trial version, not a perpetual licence. The exception is if the licence was a fake activation through an activator — that really does expire every 180 days.

What happens to your files

Nothing. Your documents, spreadsheets and presentations stay on the computer and are not damaged. Office switches to read-only mode: you can open, view and print, but not edit and save. If you were using OneDrive, the content in the cloud also remains, but the free storage shrinks to 5 GB and above that you cannot upload anything new.

The three options

1. Renew the subscription

The quickest route. You pay again and everything unlocks.

For: always the newest version, cloud storage, use on several devices.
Against: the cost repeats every year, forever. For someone who uses Word and Excel for documents, this is paying for features they never touch.

2. Move to a perpetual Office

You make a one-off purchase of Office 2021 Pro Plus, Office 2019 or Office 2016 and pay nothing more.

For: a single payment, the licence stays yours, it works offline.
Against: no cloud storage and no automatic upgrade to the next version.

In practice: if you mainly write documents, keep spreadsheets and make presentations, the perpetual version does the same job. A detailed comparison — Microsoft 365 or Office 2021.

3. Go without Office

Free options do exist — the web version of Office, LibreOffice, Google Docs. They open and save .docx and .xlsx, but with complex documents that use macros, specific fonts or precise formatting, differences appear. For daily work with other people's files, that is a risk.

How to move from a subscription to a perpetual licence

1. Uninstall Microsoft 365: Settings → Apps → Installed apps. Restart the computer.
2. Download the installation file for the version you bought. We send the direct link together with the key.
3. Install it and enter the key the first time you open Word or Excel.

Your files are not touched during uninstallation. The steps in detail are in the guide to activating Office 2021.

Which edition to choose

Professional Plus includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher and Access. Home and Business (the versions for Mac) includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. If you work on a Mac, see the Office licences for Mac.

Every licence comes with an invoice, instructions in Bulgarian and a 2-year statutory guarantee of conformity. Not sure exactly what you need? Write to us at info@litsenzi.bg — tell us what you use and we will tell you what is enough.