Update — October 5, 2026: Microsoft's October 1 cutoff for Microsoft 365 subscribers has passed. The September 22 preparation guide below is retained as historical instructions. Perpetual-license holders can still use their app; support ends October 13. If your subscription no longer opens Publisher, see the Publisher-file conversion pack and the free-tool alternatives below. Conversion results need checking against your own reference copy.

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Microsoft Publisher before October 1.

If your Publisher comes with a Microsoft 365 subscription, it stops opening on October 1, 2026. Everything you can do about that is cheapest while the program still runs: open each file yourself and save a copy in a format that will outlive it. This page is that hour of work, in order, with Microsoft's own instructions linked at each step and an honest account of what the free tools can do once Publisher is gone.

Read against Microsoft's support and lifecycle pages on 2026-09-22. Every quotation below is verbatim; the sources are listed at the end.

The deadline, precisely

Two dates. Which one is yours depends on how you bought Publisher.

Microsoft 365 subscription: October 1, 2026

Microsoft's page states: Microsoft 365 subscribers will not be able to access Publisher after October 1, 2026. It also says Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher and asks you to Convert your existing files to another format before 10/1/2026. This is the group with a real cutoff: after that date the application itself is gone from the subscription, not merely unsupported.

Perpetual Publisher 2021 (or 2019, 2016): support ends October 13, 2026, the program keeps running

The same page states: Support for the perpetual version of Publisher will end on October 13, 2026 and If you have the Perpetual version of Publisher, although support will end, you will still be able to install and use the app beyond this date. Microsoft's lifecycle announcement for Office LTSC 2021 puts it this way: After this date, Microsoft will no longer provide technical support, bug fixes, or security updates for this product. The lifecycle database lists Publisher 2021's retirement as 10/14/2026 6:59:59 AM Pacific, the end of October 13 in Redmond. If this is you, nothing stops working on October 1; you have the same conversion job, with less urgency and no updates afterwards.

Not sure which you have?

In Publisher, open File > Account. A subscription shows a Microsoft 365 product name; a one-time purchase shows a year (Publisher 2021, 2019, 2016). Do this first: it decides whether you have nine days or a comfortable margin.

One hour of triage

Find every file, then decide each one in a sentence.

1. Find every .pub file (15 minutes)

Publisher files end in .pub. Search each place a small business keeps documents, because they are rarely all in one folder:

This PC. In File Explorer, open This PC and type *.pub in the search box. Sort by Date modified. Note the folder of each hit.
OneDrive and SharePoint. Search .pub in the OneDrive web app and in each SharePoint document library you use. Files that are cloud-only (a cloud icon, not a green tick) must be downloaded before a script can open them.
Shared drives and old PCs. The same *.pub search on each mapped drive letter. Ask whoever made the last newsletter where they kept the working file; the printed copy is often the only thing anyone else has.
Email attachments. Search your mailbox for attachments named .pub. Save any you still need into one folder.

Write the list down: file name, where it lives, what it is (menu, flyer, newsletter, form, price list, certificate). A list of twenty files is normal; a list of two hundred is where the script in the next section earns its keep.

2. Decide per file: faithful copy, or editable copy? (20 minutes)

Most files need only one of these, and the answer follows from what you do with the file:

Faithful copy (PDF). Anything you print or send as-is: finished flyers, menus, past newsletters, forms people fill in by hand, certificates, signage. A PDF made by Publisher itself is the one output that keeps the layout exactly as Publisher rendered it, because Publisher is doing the rendering. Every file on your list gets a PDF, even the ones you also want to edit.
Editable copy (Word). Only the files you will keep changing: the newsletter template, the price list, the letterhead. Publisher's Word export keeps the words and their formatting and drops the design; Microsoft's page states The text and font formatting (font, size, style, underline, color, and effects) are preserved and Design elements such as graphics and columns are not preserved, and Page breaks in the publication are ignored. Treat the Word file as the text you will rebuild from, not as the document.
Rebuild in a layout tool. If a file must stay a designed, editable layout, the honest path is: PDF now, then rebuild it in whatever you are moving to. Scribus (free) reads .pub directly through the same libmspub library LibreOffice uses, with the limits described further down. We did not verify from Affinity's or Canva's own documentation whether either reads .pub; we found no primary source saying they do, so plan on handing them the PDF or rebuilding.

3. Pick the output for each row (5 minutes)

What to convert each file to, and why.
If the file is	Make	Because
A finished piece you print or email	PDF (High Quality Printing or Commercial Press)	Publisher renders it; layout, fonts and images are fixed in the PDF.
A template you keep editing	PDF and a Word document	PDF for the record; Word for the text you will rebuild from.
Going to a commercial printer	Pack and Go	Microsoft's wizard produces a compressed Publisher file and as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file, Embeds TrueType fonts in your publication and Creates a list of any fonts that the wizard can't embed.
Something you might need to re-open in a layout tool later	PDF and keep the original .pub	Keep the .pub: Scribus and LibreOffice Draw can read many of them after the cutoff, and the PDF is your reference for what it should look like.

While Publisher still opens

The conversion, in Microsoft's own steps.

One file: File > Export > Create PDF/XPS

Microsoft's instructions for Publisher for Microsoft 365, 2021, 2019, 2016, 2013 and 2010: open the file, then File > Export > Create PDF/XPS Document > Create PDF/XPS, choose PDF as the type, click Options, then OK and Publish. The Options dialog offers four presets; Microsoft's page describes High Quality Printing as for either desktop or copy shop printing and Commercial Press as the one that creates the largest and highest quality files for commercial printing. Pick one of those two for anything you might print again; Minimum Size is described as for online viewing as a single page. On the PDF/A question: Microsoft's Publisher pages we read document these four presets and a Print Options button; they do not document a PDF/A option for Publisher, so we do not claim one. If your copy shows an ISO 19005-1 (PDF/A) checkbox under Options, it is fine to use; if it does not, a High Quality Printing PDF is the right output.

One file: File > Save As > Word Document

For the editable copies: File > Save As, choose a location, and in Save as type pick Word Document. Expect only the text and its formatting to come across; the page's own caveats are quoted in the triage section above.

Many files: Microsoft's bulk PowerShell script

Microsoft publishes a sample script, Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1, on the retirement page linked in the sources. The prerequisite, in Microsoft's words: Ensure you have a working and licensed version of Publisher installed on your computer. That single sentence is the whole reason to act before the cutoff: the script does not convert anything by itself; it drives your installed Publisher. Microsoft's example is Convert-PubFileToPDF.ps1 -Filter "C:\Documents\*.pub" -Recurse, which walks a folder and every subfolder. Microsoft states The script is designed to continue running if it encounters errors and to display which files were converted and which files encountered an error. It will not overwrite: a PDF with the same name already present is reported as an error, so rename or move the old PDF and run it again. Practical order: copy every .pub from your list into one folder tree first (cloud-only files downloaded), run the script against that tree, then compare the count of PDFs to the count of .pub files and open every file the script reported.

Checks before you call a file done

Fonts. Open File > Info > Manage Embedded Fonts in Publisher before exporting. Microsoft's page: only TrueType fonts can be embedded, and only where the licence says May embed; a font marked Preview-only or May not embed will be substituted on any PC that lacks it. If a file uses such a font and the look matters, export the PDF from the PC that has the font installed; the PDF then carries the rendered glyphs.
Linked pictures. A picture inserted as a link shows a placeholder or a low-resolution preview if the linked file has moved. Check File > Info for a linked-picture warning and repair the links before exporting; otherwise the PDF captures the broken state. Pack and Go Creates a report of any problems with linked graphics if you want a list.
Page size and bleed. Open the PDF and confirm the page size matches the publication (a letter-size flyer should not come out as A4). If the piece has colour running to the edge and it goes to a printer, ask the printer whether they want bleed and crop marks before you export; Publisher's PDF dialog has a Print Options button, and the printer's answer, not a default, decides what you set there.
Count and open. One PDF per .pub, every page present, and a two-second look at each. A PDF that exists but shows the wrong page is the error that surfaces a year later.

After the cutoff

What the free tools can still open, measured, not promised.

LibreOffice Draw reads .pub files through libmspub

LibreOffice's Draw component registers an import filter whose display name is Microsoft Publisher 98-2010; it is built on libmspub, a library and a set of tools for reading and converting MS Publisher files. Scribus imports .pub through the same library. In LibreOffice: File > Open, choose the .pub, and Draw imports the pages; then File > Export As > Export as PDF if you want a PDF from it. Do not trust the "98-2010" label as a ceiling: in our own test, files written by newer versions opened too.

What we measured

On September 22, 2026 we ran the libmspub converter that LibreOffice and Scribus both use (pub2xhtml, libmspub 0.1.5) over eleven real .pub files gathered from public bug reports and sample files, of mixed ages, including two carrying Publisher 2016+ (16.0) metadata. Ten of the eleven produced output: pages, text and pictures. One, a two-page Publisher 2013 file with 16 images, produced nothing at all, and the tool reported the failure rather than emitting a blank page. One of the ten produced 14.5 MB of output for a single note card, which suggests pages were rasterised into images rather than kept as text; we did not settle that. Six of the eleven are each the subject of a still-open LibreOffice or libmspub bug describing some loss on that specific file: a missing or rotated image, text repeated across pages, missing borders or line breaks. "Produced output" is what we measured; it is not a fidelity score and not a guarantee that any given file of yours will open.

What that means for you

If you still have Publisher, the PDF it makes is Publisher's own rendering of the file, and the free path is not needed. Do that first.
If you have already lost access, LibreOffice Draw or Scribus will probably open the file and will probably lose something: expect font substitution, small position drift, and occasionally a missing picture. Compare against a printed copy or an old PDF if you have one.
On Linux, check that your LibreOffice package actually includes the Publisher import component: on one distribution we tested, it was missing and LibreOffice silently opened the .pub as a text file of binary garbage instead of refusing. If the result looks like random characters, your build is missing the importer; try a build from libreoffice.org before concluding the file is unreadable.
A file that libmspub refuses is not necessarily lost: the text is usually still readable inside the file with lower-level tools, and a PDF of the original can be recreated by hand from it. That is slower, but it is a cost, not a wall.

If you have .pub files you can no longer open and would rather not do this yourself, write to us at hello@kettleandhaven.com with how many files and what they are, and we will tell you what we can and cannot get out of them before anything is agreed.

Sources

Every claim above, and where it was read.

Each row is the page a claim on this guide was read from, on 2026-09-22. Quotations are verbatim from that page.
Claim	Source	Read on
Microsoft 365 subscribers lose Publisher on October 1, 2026; the perpetual version keeps working; convert before 10/1/2026; the bulk PowerShell script and its prerequisite	Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026 (Microsoft Support)	2026-09-22
Office LTSC 2021 end of support on October 13, 2026, and what stops after it	Office LTSC 2021 reaching end of support on October 13, 2026 (Microsoft Learn)	2026-09-22
Publisher 2021 retirement date in the lifecycle database	Publisher 2021 - Microsoft Lifecycle (Microsoft Learn)	2026-09-22
How to export a publication to PDF, and the four quality presets	Save As or convert a publication to .pdf or .xps using Publisher (Microsoft Support)	2026-09-22
What survives, and what does not, when a publication is saved as a Word document	Save a publication as a Word document (Microsoft Support)	2026-09-22
Manage Embedded Fonts: TrueType only, subject to the font licence	Embed fonts in a publication to ensure their availability (Microsoft Support)	2026-09-22
Pack and Go produces a compressed Publisher file plus a PDF, embeds TrueType fonts, and lists the fonts it cannot embed	Use the Pack and Go Wizard to save a file for commercial printing (Microsoft Support)	2026-09-22
LibreOffice registers a Draw import filter named "Microsoft Publisher 98-2010"	PublisherDocument.xcu (LibreOffice source)	2026-09-22
libmspub is "a library and a set of tools for reading and converting MS Publisher files"	libmspub README (LibreOffice source)	2026-09-22
Scribus reads .pub through the same libmspub library	importpub.cpp (Scribus source)	2026-09-22
Ten of eleven real .pub files produced output through libmspub; one Publisher 2013 file produced none	Our own test, run on this date with libmspub 0.1.5 (pub2xhtml) over eleven public sample files	2026-09-22

Not verified from a primary source, and therefore not claimed here: whether Publisher's PDF dialog offers a PDF/A preset; whether Affinity or Canva read .pub directly. If you can point us at Microsoft's, Affinity's or Canva's own page saying so, we will add it.