Tekla licensing 2028

What happens to your Tekla perpetual licences on 1 January 2028

Trimble has published an end of sale for maintenance on all perpetual Tekla licences. This page states the dates, quotes the source, and explains what each one means for a detailing office. It is not a pitch — the dates are Trimble's, not ours.

Last verified: 13 August 2026

What Trimble published

Quoted verbatim from Trimble's own support article. Read it at the source before acting on anything here.

“Trimble announced the end of sale of maintenance products for all perpetual license types of Tekla software.”
“The last maintenance contracts can be renewed in the fourth quarter of 2026, with all contracts ending no later than December 31, 2027.”
“starting from January 1, 2028, all Tekla software products will be available exclusively through subscription.”

Trimble User Assistance — End of Sales of Tekla Maintenance Products for Perpetual License. Checked 13 August 2026.

The dates

Date	What changes
Q4 2026	The last window in which a maintenance contract can be renewed.
31 December 2027	All maintenance contracts have expired by this date at the latest.
1 January 2028	All Tekla software products are available exclusively through subscription.

Which products are affected

Tekla Structures (all modules)
Tekla Structural Designer
Tekla Tedds
Tekla Portal Frame Designer
Tekla Connection Designer
Tekla EPM

What it means in practice

Three things follow from the dates above. None of them require you to change software.

Your perpetual licence does not stop working

A perpetual licence remains a perpetual licence. What ends is the maintenance contract attached to it — and with it access to newer versions, service packs and local help-desk support.

The decision point is earlier than 2028

The last renewal window is Q4 2026. An office that wants to keep a maintained seat has to act inside that window, not in 2027, and budgeting usually has to start a cycle before that.

Version drift becomes a project risk

Once maintenance ends, a seat stays on its last version. If clients or fabricators move to a newer file version, the gap eventually shows up as an exchange problem rather than a licensing one.

Tekla Structures is capable software and this page is not an argument against it. Most offices reading this should keep the seats they need. The reason we wrote it is simpler: the question is being asked, and the answer should be available without a sales call.

If you are reviewing options anyway, review one job — not your whole estate

A useful evaluation is narrow: take one live scope, run it in parallel while every Tekla seat stays exactly where it is, and compare the output your fabrication line actually receives. If it does not hold up, you have lost one scope's worth of time and changed nothing.

Scope a parallel run