The state of Access
Is Microsoft Access dead?
No. But the question you actually need answered is a different one.
Microsoft Access is not dead, not discontinued, and not scheduled to be. It ships today as part of most Microsoft 365 business subscriptions, Microsoft released a new perpetual version, Access 2024, with support committed through October 2029, and the product continues to receive updates. Microsoft has never announced a retirement date for Access. If someone told you otherwise, they were wrong, but they were probably wrong in an understandable way, and it is worth thirty seconds to see why, because the confusion is about to get louder.
The rumor
Where the rumor comes from
Every few years a specific version of Office reaches its end of support, and every time it happens, a wave of articles and well-meaning IT people announce that Access is dying. Right now the rumor mill has real fuel: Access 2021 reaches end of support on October 13, 2026, and the 2016 and 2019 versions already lost support in October 2025. Those dates are real. What they mean is that those particular versions stop receiving security patches, exactly the way an old version of Word or Excel does. The product line continues. Access in Microsoft 365 keeps updating on subscription, and Access 2024 is supported into 2029. A version reaching end of support is not a product dying, any more than Excel died when Excel 2019 did.
So if your database is running on Access 2016, 2019, or 2021, you do have a housekeeping item: get it onto Microsoft 365 or Access 2024. That is a modest, ordinary upgrade, not an emergency and not a rewrite.
The honest part
Alive, but legacy
Now the part the reassurance articles skip. Access is alive, but it is a legacy platform, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice.
The pool of developers who genuinely know Access and VBA is shrinking every year, because almost nobody new is learning it. Measured as a share of all questions asked on Stack Overflow, the largest public forum developers use, Access lost roughly forty percent of its relative volume between 2019 and 2021 and has held level since, a decline that comparable technologies took and then recovered from. Access has no real web or mobile story; it is desktop software, and Microsoft's own low-code energy goes to Power Apps, not Access. And Access has genuine ceilings on database size, on concurrent users, and on what happens when a networked application is pushed past what the file-based engine was designed for. None of this means your database is about to stop working. It means the platform your business depends on has a horizon, and the sensible move is to make decisions about it on your schedule rather than during a crisis.
How that decline was measured, including the query and the numbers, for readers who want to check the arithmetic.
The real decision
The question that actually matters
"Is Access dead" is a headline question. The decision in front of you is: should this specific application be stabilized where it is, or has the business outgrown it?
For a lot of companies, the right answer is stabilization. If the application fits comfortably inside what Access does well, a small number of users, a manageable amount of data, workflows that have not fundamentally changed, then the responsible path is to get it on a supported version, fix what is fragile, document how it works, and often move the data into SQL Server while keeping the Access screens your people already know. That combination quietly resolves most of the reliability complaints that get blamed on Access itself, and it costs a fraction of a rewrite.
For some companies, the honest answer is that the application has outgrown the platform. The signs are usually unmistakable: people who need it from outside the office, user counts the file format was never meant to carry, or features the business needs that keep getting deferred because the old application cannot absorb them. In that case the path is a purpose-built modern application, planned properly, with the Access system kept running until the day its replacement is genuinely ready.
Be wary of anyone whose answer does not depend on looking at your application. The vendor who says every Access database must be rewritten is selling rewrites. The one who says Access is fine forever is selling comfort. The truthful answer is always specific to what you have.
The short version
What to do this week
Nothing dramatic. Find out which version of Access your database runs on; if it is 2021 or older, plan the move to Microsoft 365 or Access 2024, and note that the 2021 deadline is October 2026. If the application is business-critical and nobody currently maintains it, that is the bigger risk, far bigger than anything on Microsoft's roadmap, and it deserves attention first. And if you want an honest read on whether your particular application should be stabilized or eventually replaced, that assessment is exactly what I do.
rob.evans@evanscoapps.com