On 1 October 2026 Microsoft removed Publisher from Microsoft 365. Your files were not deleted and not corrupted — you just no longer have a program that opens them. That is a smaller problem than it sounds, and it is fixable for free.
What didn't change: every .pub file you own is exactly where
it was, byte for byte. Nothing expired, nothing phoned home, nothing was reclaimed.
Your backups still work. These are not files that stopped working — it is a
format that stopped being readable.
What changes: Microsoft 365 no longer gives you Publisher. There is no replacement that opens the format, no migration wizard and no automatic conversion. Whatever is in your archive, you take it out yourself, or it stays in there.
The files will wait as long as you like. The people who remember what is in them may not.
On a subscription, the first date was yours and it was a hard stop. If you bought Office 2021 outright, the second was yours and it was a soft one: you keep the program, you lost the safety net. Either way the archive is the thing to deal with, and dealing with it is still free.
Install LibreOffice, open your file in LibreOffice Draw, and export it twice — once to PDF, once to ODG. PDF is the copy anyone can read and print in ten years. ODG is the one you can keep editing. LibreOffice is free and open source and it reads Publisher files with no Publisher installed, which is the reason it is the right destination rather than a newer Microsoft format.
That guide is the complete free answer, including the two fonts that fix most layout drift. For a handful of files it is all you need, and you should not pay anybody for it — us included.
It is the most common advice and the most expensive. Word is a word processor; Publisher was a page-layout program. Text boxes anchored where you put them, precise positioning, facing pages and bleed are the things Publisher did and Word argues with. Rebuilding one newsletter by hand takes an hour and comes out worse. Rebuilding a decade of them is not a project anybody finishes — which is how archives quietly get abandoned rather than converted.
This lands hardest on the people holding a shared record: a parish with twenty years of orders of service, a school with every newsletter since the building opened, a club with its certificates and programmes. Nobody owns the job, it was never on anyone's list, and the deadline has already come and gone.
That is the job this site does. Upload the archive, get every file back as a PDF and an editable ODG, plus a report listing exactly what converted and what did not, so nothing fails quietly. Pricing is one-off and by file count — $19 up to 25 files, $49 up to 250, $149 up to 2,000. If fewer than 80% of your valid Publisher files fully rescue, you don't pay for it, and the report settles that rather than anyone's opinion.
Worth saying plainly: this is an editable rescue, not a pixel-perfect clone. Layout, images and positioning normally survive; complex overlapping designs can shift. Better that you know it now than discover it after paying.
Microsoft removed Publisher from Microsoft 365. If your Publisher came with a 365 subscription, the program is no longer available to you. Your .pub files are untouched on disk — they were not deleted, moved or corrupted. You simply no longer have the program that reads them.
Not with a page-layout program. The suggested paths are Word, PowerPoint and Designer, and none of them opens a .pub file or does the job Publisher did. There is no migration tool and no automatic conversion — whatever is in your archive, you take out yourself.
Differently. A perpetual Office 2021 licence keeps working; the program does not switch off. What ended is support and security fixes, on October 13, 2026. That buys you time to convert on your own schedule, but an unsupported program reading your only copy of an archive is not a long-term plan.
By hand, roughly two to four minutes per file once LibreOffice is installed — open, export to PDF, save as ODG, note whether it worked. Forty files is an afternoon. Four hundred is a week you probably do not have, which is the point at which people either give up or automate it.
Convert everything you would be upset to lose, which is usually more than the handful you actively use. Old newsletters, orders of service and certificates tend to matter as a record rather than as live documents, and the record is exactly the thing nobody thinks to rescue until it cannot be opened.
You can, and nothing bad happens to the files themselves. The cost is that later is harder: fewer machines have Publisher installed every month, the people who knew which file was which move on, and you end up doing it under pressure because somebody needs a document today.