What happens to InfoPath forms after SharePoint retires it
Microsoft removed InfoPath Forms Services from SharePoint Online after 14 July 2026, and support for the InfoPath 2013 program ended the same day. The forms people filled in over the years are still sitting in their libraries as .xml files. What changed is that nothing Microsoft supports will draw them any more.
The dates
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 18 May 2026 | Publishing new InfoPath forms, or updates to existing ones, blocked in SharePoint Online for every tenant. | Message center MC1255407 |
| 14 July 2026 | InfoPath Forms Services retired and removed from SharePoint Online, Government and DoD clouds included. No extensions. | MC1255407, SharePoint blog, 30 June 2023 |
| 14 July 2026 | Extended support for the InfoPath 2013 program ends. | Microsoft lifecycle page |
| 14 July 2026 | InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2016, 2019 and Subscription Edition no longer supported. | Subscription Edition deprecations |
The message center notice says: "After May 18, 2026: Publishing new InfoPath forms or publishing updates to existing forms will be blocked" and "July 14, 2026: InfoPath Forms Service will be fully retired". It adds that "there is no migration tool provided." The lifecycle page lists the end of extended support for InfoPath 2013 as 7/15/2026 6:59:59 AM Pacific time, which Microsoft's notices call 14 July. Checked on 2026-10-14.
What happened to the forms already in SharePoint
The retirement removed the service that drew forms in the browser. It did not delete libraries. The submitted forms are ordinary .xml files, and the template is still at Forms/template.xsn in each library. Microsoft's own advice for forms nobody migrated is to download the .xsn and .xml files and open them in InfoPath 2013, but that program is out of support and its download page on Microsoft's site now reads "this download is no longer available".
On SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, a Microsoft support engineer reported that the September 2026 cumulative update turns InfoPath Forms Services off by default, and that the component will be removed in a later update (Stefan Gossner's blog, 21 September 2026).
Reports differ on whether some SharePoint Online tenants could still open old forms in the weeks after the date. Either way the service is unsupported and Microsoft has said it will not come back.
Keeping the records readable
Most organisations end up doing two separate things:
- New submissions move to something else, usually Power Apps, Microsoft Forms or a SharePoint list form. That is a rebuild, and no tool does it for you.
- Old submissions stay as records. For retention they need to be readable without InfoPath, and for reporting or migration their data needs to come out as a table.
The second job is what Formhaul does. It reads the template and the forms in the browser and gives back a PDF of each form, drawn with the form's own view, plus a CSV and Excel workbook of every field. PDFs in bulk and the field table explain what you get.
One more date: browsers dropping XSLT
InfoPath views are XSLT stylesheets. Some quick fixes for viewing old forms, such as adding an xml-stylesheet line to each form and opening it in a browser, rely on the browser's own XSLT engine. Chrome removes it in version 158, due on 17 November 2026, and the Firefox and WebKit projects have said they plan to follow (Chrome's announcement). Formhaul carries its own XSLT engine, so it does not depend on that.