When Microsoft 365 Expires: You Keep the Files, Not the Apps

Microsoft's own summary is reassuring and accurate: your account "reverts to a free account, you don't lose any data".

Both halves of that sentence are true. Neither tells you what the experience is actually like, which is a computer full of documents you can read and cannot change.

Reduced Functionality Mode

This is Microsoft's name for what happens to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the rest, and it is an unusually honest piece of product naming.

"You can still open and view existing documents."

"The apps enter Reduced Functionality Mode, which means you can't create new documents."

So the software does not uninstall itself, nag you into a corner, or hold your files hostage. Every .docx you have ever written still opens on your machine. You simply cannot write another one.

For a lot of households that is a tolerable state to sit in for a while — the archive stays readable, and the occasional new document can go through a free alternative. It is considerably better behaviour than the alternative of locking the files themselves.

The part that catches people is that this is not announced loudly at the moment it matters. You discover it when you sit down to write something.

The 5GB cliff

The storage side is where the real risk lives.

A Microsoft 365 Family or Personal subscription comes with a terabyte of OneDrive per person. When it expires, your quota reverts to the free 5 GB.

Think about the gap. Someone comfortably using 400 GB is not slightly over the new limit — they are eighty times over it. There is no realistic housekeeping that closes that, which means "delete some files" is not available as an answer the way it is on a normal full account.

While over the limit, Microsoft states "You can't upload, edit, or sync new files, such as Camera Roll". Phone photo backup stops, which is the quiet one — a phone that has stopped backing up looks entirely normal until it is lost.

Then the clocks start

This is the part the expiry article states plainly and most coverage omits:

• After three months: "If you remain over your OneDrive storage limit, your OneDrive account is frozen."
• After six months: "Microsoft might delete your OneDrive and all files within it."

So "you don't lose any data" is true at the moment of expiry and has a half-life. The full consequences of a freeze — read-only files, no email, no Teams attachments, and no recovery after deletion — are covered in what it means when your OneDrive is frozen.

Six months from an expiry you have already decided not to renew is an easy thing to not think about. That is the whole risk.

Email is on the same meter

Worth separating out, because the failure is so disconnected from the cause.

Your Outlook.com account remains active. But if you exceed your storage quota you cannot send or receive email, and incoming emails are returned to the sender.

You are not notified that someone tried to reach you. They get a bounce from an address they know is correct, and most people conclude the recipient is ignoring them rather than that a cloud subscription lapsed.

For anyone running a small business off an Outlook.com address, this is the consequence to prevent, and it is prevented by getting under 5 GB rather than by anything to do with email.

The order to do things in

Download everything first. Over quota you can still read and still download. Use the sync client rather than the browser — our OneDrive exit report explains why browser downloads cap at 10 GB per zip and 20 GB overall, and why OneNote notebooks never appear in a download at all.

Then decide about the subscription honestly. If you are going back on it, the whole problem evaporates. If you are not, the five gigabytes you are left with is the budget you are actually designing for, and the files need somewhere else to live.

Then get under 5 GB deliberately, not in a panic at month three.

And set a reminder at ten weeks, before the freeze rather than after it. The freeze is the point at which this stops being a storage problem and starts being an email problem.

In perspective

Microsoft handles expiry better than it is usually given credit for. Nothing is deleted at the moment you stop paying, the apps keep reading your files indefinitely, and every stage is documented with a number attached.

What makes it the tightest timeline of the major services is simply that the numbers are small: three months and six months, against Google's two years. The policy is not harsher in spirit — it is just shorter, and it is attached to a storage drop steep enough that most people cannot housekeep their way out of it.

The deadlines compared across all four major services puts the difference in one table.