Significant changes to SAP maintenance and support were announced on July 9, 2026. The European Commission accepted binding commitments from SAP as a result of an investigation into SAP's on-premise ERP maintenance and aftermarket support. The SAP commitments run ten years from the effective date (September 2025) and apply worldwide to all current and future on-premise customers. SAP compliance is being monitored by an independent trustee.
- SAP will loosen its on-premise support rules for ten years. Cloud is unchanged.
- Leaving SAP support used to be a one-way door because coming back was expensive. That door now swings both ways. No reinstatement fee, and back-maintenance is capped at six months.
- Customers can now split their landscape and support each part differently, or not at all. There is no cap on how many parts, no fee to split, and no repricing.
- SAP has published lists of what is safe to split (BW, BusinessObjects, GTS, SRM, Portal, regional ERP systems) and what is not (the core ERP modules).
- No deadline moved. ECC still ends in 2027, and support still ends 2030. This is about more choice, not more time.
What it means to SAP customers
- Return to support. SAP fully waives the reinstatement fee. Back-maintenance is capped at the lesser amount of the following: 50% of the fees that would have been due for the off-support period or six months of fees, calculated per commercial installation. For a number of outdated products, back-maintenance is waived entirely.
- Splitting the landscape. Customers can split their landscape into separate commercial installations and select a different SAP support level, a different maintenance provider, or no support at all. Splitting does not trigger license repricing, does not by itself require buying new licenses, and does not start a new initial term.
- Terminating licenses. Customers may terminate licenses and the associated support, without losing their volume discount, in defined cases: products whose only remaining maintenance phase is customer-specific maintenance (end-of-life products), failed implementations attributable to SAP, insolvency or bankruptcy, and a workforce reduction of more than 10% over two years (permitting up to a 10% user-license reduction, once every two years, retroactive to 1 January 2025). Divestiture is handled separately, with licenses transferable to the buyer or terminable, again without re-discounting or transfer fees.
- Initial term. The minimum term during which support cannot be terminated no longer restarts on each additional license purchase, and a landscape split does not start a new term.
- Single-metric contracts. Wider availability for contracts above EUR 500,000, priced on one mutually agreed metric. An annual audit can reduce the maintenance base by up to 20% a year when the customer is underutilizing.
- Enforcement. An internal SAP clearing structure, staffed by people outside the sales organization and not compensated on license or support sales, handles disputes over how SAP applies the commitments. The monitoring trustee sits above the internal review board.
- Cloud is out of scope. RISE, Cloud ERP Private Edition, and S/4HANA Cloud are not impacted.
The deterrent to leaving SAP support was never the exit. It was the re-entry. The Commission found that SAP charged reinstatement and back-maintenance fees to returning customers that, in some cases, matched what they would have paid had they never left.
Segmenting which products are under support gives customers the ability to customize their support model, and the return-to-support cap makes support decisions reversible. The end of the initial-term restart removes the mechanism that reset the lock-in clock on every purchase. Together, they lower the cost of support adjustments that were previously enforceable by SAP.
No maintenance dates have been adjusted
The decision changes commercial terms, not lifecycle dates. ECC mainstream maintenance still ends December 31, 2027, for EHP 6 through 8, with extended maintenance to 2030 for an additional fee. Official support for the existing landscape ends in 2030, regardless of who provides maintenance in the interim.
That 2030 date is the planning constraint, not the ten-year commitment window. SAP has published detailed lists (in three annexes) of the products under consideration:
It is notable that these are recommendations. There are no limitations on what can be separated from support, but Annex 3 describes the products that are problematic when split from support.
Companies can keep running proven, heavily customized core systems while adding targeted cloud components alongside them, preserving years of investment while still consuming new innovation. The focus should be on identifying the segments of the SAP ecosystem that can realize value from SAP innovation tools, not merely looking at what to stop paying SAP for.
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