How often should businesses replace computers? A per-device answer for 2026

The short answer, and why it is incomplete

The benchmarks say about four years for a laptop and four and a half for a desktop. Sage Sustainable Electronics, in its January 2026 ITAM benchmarking report covering 56 organizations and 2.5 million assets, recorded an expected laptop retirement age of 4.0 years and a desktop age of about 4.6. Forrester, in a 2024 study commissioned by Microsoft, found enterprises refreshing every three to four years. If someone has quoted you a fleet replacement on a four-year rule, they are quoting the industry average.

The average hides the two things that cost money. Some of the machines at four years are fine and will run for two more. Some of the machines at two years crash every week. A rule that replaces by age pays for the first group and ignores the second. The owner of a 400-person company sees both as one line called hardware, which is why the quote looks unavoidable.

What Windows 10 changed this year

Windows 10 reached end of support on 14 October 2025. A business that still runs it and wants security updates buys Extended Security Updates from Microsoft. Microsoft Learn lists the commercial price at $61 per device for the first year, states that the price doubles every consecutive year for a maximum of three years, and says the years are cumulative: buy in year two and you pay for year one as well. Year two began on 14 October 2026 and runs to 12 October 2027, per Microsoft Partner Center, so a device enrolling today costs $183 to cover.

That number is useful because it is small against a new PC and large against zero. For a device that can take Windows 11, upgrading in place costs nothing in hardware. For a device that cannot, $183 buys a year of time to replace it in a planned quarter instead of a panic. The question for each Windows 10 machine is which of those two it is, and the Windows 11 requirements decide: TPM 2.0, UEFI with Secure Boot, 4 GB of memory, 64 GB of storage and a supported processor, which for Intel means eighth-generation Core or newer and for AMD means Ryzen 2000 desktop or Ryzen 3000 mobile parts or newer.

What 2026 prices changed

Replacement is dearer than it was. Gartner said in February 2026 that combined DRAM and solid-state drive prices will rise 130 percent by the end of the year and that average PC prices will rise 17 percent against 2025. IDC, in June 2026, forecast the same 17 percent growth in average selling price and said it expected no meaningful memory relief before the end of 2027. Omdia reported in October 2026 that the share of a PC bill of materials taken by memory and storage had risen from around 15 percent to nearly 40 percent.

For an owner the arithmetic is direct. Every purchase you defer because the device is fine is worth about a sixth more than it was last year, and every purchase you make because a date said so costs a sixth more too. The decision per device has never been worth more.

Four questions to ask about each machine

You do not need a platform to ask these. You need the inventory export from whoever manages your devices, and an afternoon.

• How old is it against the expected life you have set for its class? The class life is a default you check against your own repair data, and a device past it is a review, never an automatic purchase.
• Does the user run what it was bought for? A workstation with a discrete graphics card that has opened nothing heavier than a spreadsheet in six months is the wrong device for that desk, and the right device for a desk that is due.
• Is it generating tickets? Crashes, unexpected restarts and slow startups show up in Intune Endpoint analytics for free, and in your service desk queue if you ask for the report by device.
• Can it take Windows 11? If yes, upgrade and keep scoring it. If no, it is in the replace queue whatever its age, and the only question is which quarter.

Turning the answers into four verdicts

Every device ends up with one of four verdicts. Keep means the evidence says it is fine; if the calendar had it due, the purchase is deferred and that deferral is a saving you can show finance. Redeploy means it is too much machine for its user and someone else who is due needs it. Right-size means it is due, and the next one should be a smaller class. Replace means it is due and the signals agree, and no saving is claimed on it.

The savings are a floor made of three lines that add up on the page: deferred purchases, avoided wrong-size purchases, and the provisioning hours that no longer happen. The redeploy pool is shown separately as upside, because a redeploy only saves money once the machine has actually moved. Our sample report shows the format on a fictional 7,400-device fleet; the initial report runs it on yours from an export, for fleets of 1,000 devices and up.

If your fleet is under 1,000 devices

You can still run the four questions yourself in an afternoon, and the result will be good enough to challenge a quote. Ask whoever manages your devices for the Intune export from Devices, then All devices, with every column added, and for the Endpoint analytics device performance export if your licensing includes it. Put the two side by side in a spreadsheet, add a column for the class each device was bought as, and mark the devices past their class life. Then mark devices with restarts or blue screens in the available Endpoint analytics reporting window. Use retained telemetry or service desk records if your review needs 90 days of history. Mark the ones the readiness report says cannot take Windows 11 as well.

The devices with no marks except age are your keep list, and the quote should not include them. The devices with two or more marks are your replace list, and they should be funded first. Everything in between is a conversation with the person who uses the machine, which is the conversation the calendar was skipping. Smaller fleets can still send us the export for an initial report; we will tell you if the numbers are too thin for the savings lines to mean much, and send you the split anyway.

Common questions