Atlassian Data Center end of life: what to plan now
The dates that matter, the three options you have, and a migration timeline that fits before them.
On 8 September 2025 Atlassian announced that its Data Center products will reach end of life. If your Jira, Confluence or Jira Service Management runs on Data Center, the clock is now running. This is what the dates mean and how to plan around them.
The dates that matter
- 30 March 2026: new customers can no longer buy Data Center subscriptions or Data Center apps from the Marketplace.
- 30 March 2028: existing customers can no longer buy new subscriptions, expansions or new Marketplace apps.
- 28 March 2029: Data Center subscriptions and their Marketplace apps expire, and the products become read-only.
Until 28 March 2029 Atlassian keeps providing technical support, fixes for critical security vulnerabilities and connectors to Atlassian Cloud. Renewals are still possible, but they cannot run past the end-of-life date. Bitbucket and Bamboo Data Center are the exception: they are not being retired.
Your three options
- Move to Atlassian Cloud. The most common path. Most apps have Cloud versions, and Atlassian offers migration tooling for the data.
- Move to another platform. For service management, ServiceNow or another ITSM tool can be the better fit; for project work, a different tracker. This is a bigger change for your teams.
- Stay on Data Center until 2029. Possible, but every month of delay leaves less time for testing, and expansions stop in March 2028.
Why to start now rather than in 2028
A Data Center to Cloud migration usually takes 4–12 weeks of work. The calendar time is longer: app owners need to agree on replacements, key users need to test, and the cutover has to fit around releases and holidays. Instances that have grown for ten years carry hundreds of custom fields and dozens of apps; cleaning them up before the move is where most of the time goes.
A realistic plan
- Week 1: assessment of users, apps, custom fields, workflows and integrations.
- Weeks 2–3: decisions on every app (Cloud version, built-in feature or retire) and cleanup of unused fields and schemes.
- Weeks 3–8: test migrations in a sandbox, checked by key users from each team.
- Final weekend: cutover, followed by a week of support for users.
If you are not sure which option fits, start with the assessment. It gives you the numbers (apps, fields, users, effort) that the decision needs, whichever way it goes.