Transfer Office to a new PC: the four routes

Before you install anything, identify which type of Office licence you have.

The new PC is on your desk and the question is how to transfer Office to a new PC, but everywhere you read something different. By the end of this page you will know which of the four routes matches your licence, and you will either have followed it or know exactly why it does not exist for you.

Almost everyone starts with the steps. Wrong order. The steps differ by licence type, and for one of the four the honest answer is that you cannot transfer anything.

Not sure? Open Word or Excel on the old PC and go to File > Account. Under Product Information you will find the full product name, version number and build number. If there is a year in the name, you have a one-time purchase. If it says Microsoft 365, you have a subscription. For the bit version, click through to About Excel, and via the same button you can open the licence terms that apply to your copy.

Those two minutes in File > Account are the step almost everyone skips, and it is exactly the step that determines the rest of your afternoon.

A Microsoft 365 subscription does not need to be transferred; you simply sign in on the new PC.

With a subscription, the licence sits with your Microsoft account, not with a computer. So there is no transfer, only an additional installation.

1. Sign in on your new PC to Microsoft with the same account you used to buy the subscription, and open the installation page in your account.
2. Choose Install apps and then Install. The installation file downloads.
3. Run the installation file and wait for the message that Office has been installed.
4. Open Word or Excel and accept the licence terms. That completes activation.

You may install Microsoft 365 on all your devices and stay signed in on five devices at the same time. If you go above that, sign out of an old device remotely. You do that on the installation page of your account, in the Devices block, with the Sign out of Office button next to the device in question. The page follows the language of your account, so the button may be labelled differently; the location is the same.

https://account.microsoft.com/services/office/install

Allow some patience: Microsoft states that it can take up to 72 hours before Office on that device notices that you have signed out remotely. After that, you can still open and print documents there, but no longer edit them or create new ones.

A retail copy of Office may move, but at most once every ninety days.

Have you ever bought Office separately, as a box or as a download with a product key? Then you have a one-time purchase. You may move it. Two conditions apply, and almost nobody knows the second one.

Microsoft states on its support page about transferring an Office licence that you may install a one-time purchase on only one PC or Mac, and further that you may move Office 2024 or Office 2021 to another computer that belongs to you, but not more than once every ninety days, with an exception for hardware failure: then it may be sooner. With every move, you must remove the software from the previous computer. Checked on 8 August 2026.

That is not a technical block; it is the condition under which you bought it. So do not shuttle back and forth between two machines. Choose one.

• Remove Office on the old PC via Settings, in the list of installed apps. Do this before you dispose of or wipe the machine.
• Sign in to your Microsoft account on the services and subscriptions page, using the same account with which you originally activated Office.
• Start the installation on the new PC from that page. You do not need the product key again as long as the purchase is linked to your account.
• Is the purchase not linked to your account yet? Then link it first via the Microsoft setup page, using your product key.

https://account.microsoft.com/services/
https://www.microsoft365.com/setup

Mind the catch. For subscriptions there is a sign-out button, but Microsoft states plainly that there is no way to deactivate Office Home & Student, Office Home & Business, Office Professional or standalone Office apps. Removing the old installation is therefore not a formality; it is the only action that counts.

If activation on the new PC gets stuck, one error code appears more often than all the others put together; we deal with it separately in the article about Office activation failing with error 0xC004F074.

Office that came with your old computer may not move to the new one.

This is the heart of the whole story. If Office was included ready to use when you bought the previous PC, that licence is tied to that device. Not to you, not to your account: to that computer.

The licence terms for pre-installed Office are brief on this. Anyone who obtained the software pre-installed on a device may transfer it to another user only together with that device. If you sell the laptop, Office goes with the laptop. If you keep the laptop, Office stays there. There is no route that changes that.

This is also why a reader was recently left feeling empty: he had carefully wiped and sold the old laptop, and only discovered on the new machine that the Office on it had never been his personally. He had never seen the product key. That is correct: Microsoft explains that when a PC is supplied with paid Office, the digital product key is sent to the PC the moment you activate Windows. You receive no printed key, because there is nothing to print.

But first check this: if the new PC only had Office without you ever paying anything, Microsoft says it is usually a one-month trial of Microsoft 365 Family, not a full licence. The distinction between what belongs to a device and what is sold separately plays a role everywhere and is explained in the overview of OEM, retail and volume licences.

If you really are tied to an OEM version, a separate, transferable version is the only real way out. A one-time purchase such as Microsoft Office 2021 Pro Plus is attached to you and not to the motherboard, and simply moves with you to your next computer.

A work or school licence is arranged by your system administrator, not by you.

If you sign in to Office with your work or school address, the licence comes from a central assignment. You cannot move it, and that is not a restriction but the design.

What you do yourself is brief: install Office on the new PC and sign in with your work account. The licence falls into place as long as your account still has an assignment. If you hand back the old PC, mention it.

If you work at a small organisation without an IT department, the admin is probably the person who pays the invoices. That person has the button.

You cannot transfer Office to a different Microsoft account, even with support.

This is the question that most often leads to disappointment. Someone has Microsoft 365 on an old, half-forgotten address and wants to move the subscription to their current account. Microsoft is clear about this: an existing Microsoft 365 subscription cannot be transferred from one Microsoft account to another.

What you can do is let the subscription expire and start again on the correct account. For Microsoft 365 Family, Microsoft describes that route as follows: turn off automatic renewal so the current subscription expires, then have the new account holder purchase a subscription, and then have them share it with the family members.

My advice is different from what people hope to hear: keep that old account. As long as a purchase is attached to it, it remains proof of ownership. A lost password is annoying; a discarded account is final.

With a one-time purchase it is different. For users in the European Economic Area, Microsoft describes a route in which you transfer your licence to another person as far as the law permits, by contacting customer service. Microsoft then ends your entitlement and sends the new licence holder instructions to link the licence to their own account.

A USB stick or a migration tool does not move a licence.

This question comes up so often that it deserves its own heading. No, you cannot copy Office to a USB stick and unpack it on the new PC. And no, the migration tools offered everywhere do not solve this.

The reason is simple once you know where a licence lives. Office consists of two things: files on your drive and an activation registered with Microsoft. Such a tool copies the first half. The second half, the only one that matters, stays behind.

Such a tool can take your documents and some of your settings with it. Useful work, but it does not touch your licence, and that is exactly the difference that disappears in the sales copy.

Your documents, your Outlook folders and your PST files are separate from the licence.

A licence does not move with your files, and your files do not move with your licence. Two separate jobs, and people forget the second until they open Outlook and look at an empty inbox.

If you use a Microsoft 365 or Exchange account, Outlook downloads everything from the server again. If you use POP, your mail sits in a PST file on the old drive. Microsoft gives this location:

C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Outlook Files

Copy that PST file to the new PC, set up your email account there first and then open the file in Outlook. Two notes from Microsoft itself: moving a PST file does not bring your account settings with it, and you cannot move an OST file anyway, because Outlook recreates it as soon as you add an account.

Do not forget your signatures and your custom dictionary. Nobody misses them until the first email has to go out.

Still not working? These are the causes that most often turn out to be right.

The messages are short and tell you little. These four explain by far the most cases:

• You are signed in with the wrong account. Many people have two Microsoft accounts and the purchase is attached to the other one. Check in File > Account which address you are signed in with.
• The banner says the product has been deactivated (in the English display, "Product Deactivated"). Then the sign-in has expired or has been released elsewhere. Sign in again with the account the licence is attached to.
• The banner says an unlicensed product (in the English display, "Unlicensed Product"). With a one-time purchase that usually points to an installation that was never linked to the purchase, not to a faulty licence.
• You have hit the ninety-day limit. If you moved Office recently once already, this is not a fault but the condition doing its job. If the previous machine broke, the hardware failure exception applies.

One more check: look at the devices page of your Microsoft account to see which machines are still attached. Remove a PC you have not had for two years there with the Remove device button.

https://account.microsoft.com/devices

If you are still stuck, email us with the product name shown in File > Account and the exact message you see; with those two details it is usually resolved in a single reply.

What still strikes me after all these years: the people who finish fastest still have the old computer switched on. Not because they take anything from it, but because they can still look something up. So do not wipe that machine until the new one genuinely works, and not one evening earlier.