IBM i 7.4 end of support is September 30. Here is the bill

IBM i 7.4 end of support arrives on September 30, 2026, when the release loses standard support. That is 28 days from now, and if your shop is one of the many still running it, you are not upgrading in 28 days. This is about what the alternative costs, what it stops covering, and what you should actually have done before the end of the month.

The number that matters is not on any vendor landing page. It is in a PDF IBM last revised in February, and it says your maintenance bill goes up by 150 percent in year one and 250 percent by year three.

What actually happens on September 30

Nothing dramatic. Your system IPLs on October 1 exactly like it did the day before. No license expires, no partition refuses to start, and nobody from IBM calls.

What ends is standard support. From October 1, IBM i 7.4 moves into Service Extension, IBM’s paid, narrower support tier, and it runs there through September 30, 2029.

Worth knowing how IBM labelled this. Announcement letter AD25-0894, dated September 16, 2025, does not use the phrase “End of Support” for 7.4. It files the date under “Change in service level,” a detail IT Jungle’s readers had to dig out of the announcement themselves. The deadline did not get softer. The label did. If your team searched IBM’s site for an end of support date and came up empty, that is why.

IBM also stopped selling 7.4 on April 30, 2026, along with the licensed program products bundled with it: BRMS (5770-BR2), Db2 Mirror (5770-DBM), PowerHA SystemMirror (5770-HAS), Cryptographic Device Manager, Content Manager OnDemand, Web Enablement, and Rational Development Studio. The practical consequence lands on shops further back than 7.4. If you are sitting on 7.1 or 7.2 and were planning to hop to 7.4 as a stepping stone toward 7.5, that license is no longer orderable. IT Jungle suggests IBM may make quiet exceptions for customers genuinely trying to get current. Do not plan around a quiet exception.

IBM i 7.4 Service Extension pricing, year by year

IBM publishes the Service Extension pricing formula in a document called “Service Extension for IBM i 7.4, 7.3 and 7.2”, last updated February 25, 2026. Almost nobody reads it. Here is what it says.

Base Software Maintenance is a prerequisite. Service Extension is not a replacement for SWMA, it is a surcharge on top of it. If you let SWMA lapse to save money, you cannot buy Service Extension at all.

The surcharge, as a multiple of your base SWMA:

Service Extension year	Surcharge	Total, on IBM’s $1,000/core example
Year 1 (Oct 2026 to Sep 2027)	1.5x base SWMA	$2,500 per core
Year 2 (Oct 2027 to Sep 2028)	2x base SWMA	$3,000 per core
Year 3 (Oct 2028 to Sep 2029)	2.5x base SWMA	$3,500 per core

The $1,000 per core figure is IBM’s own worked example, not ours. Substitute your real SWMA number and your real core count and the shape holds.

Run the three-year total. Staying on 7.4 through the full Service Extension window costs $9,000 per core on that example. Being on a supported release for the same three years costs $3,000 per core. You are paying three times as much for less support, on an eight-core box that is a $48,000 gap, and every year you wait the multiplier climbs rather than settles.

One more line in that document deserves attention: “An upgrade to the most recent cumulative fix or PTF level may be required for problem resolution.” Paying for Service Extension does not buy you the right to sit still. You still have to keep cume current, which means you still need the patch windows the August PTF batch made so unpleasant.

What the money does not buy

This is the part the vendor posts skip, and it is the part that should change the decision.

Service Extension for 7.4 is listed as “New Defect plus Usage and Known Defect,” which sounds like full coverage. It is not, because the same document carries a long exception table. These components get usage and known defect support only, meaning IBM will help you use them and acknowledge bugs already on file, and will not fix anything new:

Db2 Mirror for i (5770-DBM)
Rational Application Management Toolset (5770-AMT)
Communications Utilities (5761-CM1)
Infoprint Server (5722-IP1)
OmniFind Text Search Server (5733-OMF)
Universal Manageability Enablement (5770-UME)
IBM i Access for Web (5770-XH2)
XML Toolkit (5733-XT2)
Developer Kit for Java, Option 19, which is IBM Technology for Java 11 64-bit

Inside the base operating system, the DNS server (Option 31), DHCP and RADIUS are all usage and known defect only. BRMS (5770-BR1) and CICS Transaction Server (5770-DFH) are both listed at that level for 7.4 as well.

Read that list again with a resilience hat on. Db2 Mirror and BRMS are the two things a shop staying on an old release is most likely to be leaning on. A shop paying 2.5 times its SWMA to keep 7.4 running safely is paying a premium for precisely the components that just got downgraded. BRMS has its own separate bill to worry about too: the paid subscription version costs $400 per core per year, and it is not covered by anything in this Service Extension math.

The Java 11 entry is the one that will bite quietly. Java 11 is where a lot of IBM i shops landed and stopped. Under Service Extension, new defects in it do not get fixed. That is not the same as Java being unsupported, and nobody should panic, but if you have a JVM-heavy workload on 7.4 it belongs on your risk register now rather than in month seven.

If you are on 7.3, the same day hurts more

September 30, 2026 is not just a 7.4 date. IBM i 7.3’s first Service Extension expires on exactly the same day.

7.3 then gets what IBM calls an extended Service Extension, October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2028. The price for that one is 3 times base SWMA on top of base SWMA. On the $1,000 example, that is $4,000 per core per year starting October 1. A 7.3 shop pays more on day one than a 7.4 shop pays in year three.

PowerHA SystemMirror for i 7.2, which pairs with both 7.2 and 7.3, also runs out of Service Extension on September 30, 2026, with pricing available only by quote from IBM Technology Lifecycle Services.

And for reference on where this road ends: IBM i 7.2’s extended Service Extension expired on April 30, 2026. There is no further paid tier. That is the actual cliff, and it is behind you, not ahead.

Why you cannot just upgrade

Every competitor post on this deadline implies you still have time to act. For a large share of the affected base, that is not true, and the reason is hardware.

IBM i 7.5 runs on Power9, Power10 and Power11. IBM’s own upgrade planning page states plainly that it is not supported on Power8 or earlier. IBM’s 7.6 hardware planning page raises the floor again: 7.6 requires Power10 or later.

So if you are running 7.4 on Power8 iron, this is not an operating system project. It is a capital purchase, a procurement cycle, a migration window and an application regression test. Nobody starts that on September 2 and finishes it by September 30, and what an entry Power11 box costs, plus the trap that new hardware alone does not clear the date, is the other half of that decision.

If you are on Power9, you have a real option. 7.5 is available to you on the hardware you own, and that changes the calculation completely. Check the box before you check the calendar.

For anyone shopping, the current entry Power11 machine is the Power S1112, which supports IBM i at the P05 tier with a four core and 64 GB ceiling for IBM i partitions. IBM still has not published public list pricing for it, so any number you see quoted is somebody’s estimate.

The three doors

There are only three, and the useful thing is to name them honestly rather than pretend there is a clever fourth.

Door one: pay. Buy Service Extension, budget for 1.5x rising to 2.5x, and accept that Db2 Mirror, BRMS, CICS and Java 11 are now on their own. Rational for a shop with a funded migration already scheduled inside the three-year window. Expensive as a permanent posture.

Door two: upgrade. If you are on Power9 or later, go to 7.5. If you are on Power8, this becomes a hardware conversation with a lead time measured in months. Start it this quarter regardless, because door one gets more expensive every October.

Door three: leave. Some shops will use this deadline as the trigger to get off the platform entirely. That is a legitimate answer and also the most expensive and slowest of the three, for reasons that have very little to do with the operating system and everything to do with what actually happens when IBM i shops migrate.

Notice what none of the three doors turns on. Not one of them is blocked by the operating system. They are blocked by hardware lead times, budget cycles, and whether anyone left in the building knows what the applications on that box actually do. That last one is the expensive part of every IBM i decision, and it does not get cheaper by waiting.

What there is not is a door labelled “do nothing and stay safe.” Doing nothing means running an out-of-service release with no paid support behind it, which is fine right up until the CVE that lands in month seven with no PTF coming.

What to have done before September 30

Four things, all achievable in 28 days, none of which is an upgrade.

Confirm your processor generation. Power8 or Power9 decides which doors are even open to you. Everything else follows from this.
Confirm base SWMA is current and stays current. It is a hard prerequisite for Service Extension. Letting it lapse removes door one entirely.
Get a real quote. The multipliers are public, your SWMA number and core count are not. Ask your IBM rep or business partner for the actual figure, for all three years, in writing. Take it to finance with the three-year total, not just year one.
Get current on cume. IBM can require the latest cumulative PTF level before it works a problem under Service Extension. Being behind on cume in October means paying for support you cannot use.

Bottom line

September 30 is not a cliff, it is a price increase with a coverage cut attached. Your system keeps running. Your bill goes up 150 percent in year one and 250 percent by year three, and the components most likely to matter in an outage quietly stop getting new fixes.

The right move depends almost entirely on one fact you can check this afternoon. If you are on Power9 or later, plan the 7.5 upgrade now and treat Service Extension as a short bridge, not a destination. If you are on Power8, buy the bridge, start the hardware conversation this quarter, and go into it knowing the toll rises every October until 2029.

The shops that get burned by this deadline will not be the ones who paid. They will be the ones who found out about it in November, and the ones who assumed the person who knows how to run the upgrade will still be there when the window opens.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does IBM i 7.4 support end?

Standard support for IBM i 7.4 ends on September 30, 2026. IBM’s announcement letter AD25-0894 files this under “Change in service level” rather than “End of Support”, which is why plenty of shops missed it. Service Extension then runs from October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2029.

How much does IBM i 7.4 Service Extension cost?

IBM prices it as a multiple of your base Software Maintenance, which stays a prerequisite. Year one adds 1.5 times base SWMA, year two adds 2 times, year three adds 2.5 times. On IBM’s own $1,000 per core example that is $2,500, then $3,000, then $3,500 per core per year.

Does Service Extension cover everything on IBM i 7.4?

No. Db2 Mirror for i, BRMS, CICS Transaction Server, Java 11, the DNS server, DHCP and RADIUS all drop to usage and known defect support, meaning IBM fixes nothing new in them. The full exception list is in IBM’s Service Extension document.

Can I upgrade from IBM i 7.4 to 7.5 on my current hardware?

Only if you are on Power9 or later. IBM i 7.5 does not run on Power8 or earlier, and IBM i 7.6 requires Power10 or later. If you are on Power8, the OS deadline is really a hardware purchase with a lead time attached.