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Leandro Cesar de Melhado e Lima's avatar
Leandro Cesar de Melhado e Lima
Brass Contributor
Oct 30, 2025

Data access after Project Online (PWA) retirement

As the retirement of Project Online (PWA) approaches, some questions have come up regarding what will happen to the data and related content. I’d like to ask if anyone has information or guidance on...
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Shardul Pasare's avatar
Shardul Pasare
Copper Contributor
May 15, 2026

Hello Leandro Cesar de Melhado e Lima​,

We are having below scenario in our environment and we are not sure about impact as well 

Our PWA site collection is seperate site collection and I believe that as per Microsoft this site collection will not be accessible after retirement. But our projects sites are getting created as subsite under other site collection which has classic team site template. So wanted to check if there is any impact on these  project sites of this retirement. 

Thanks in advance

 

 

Leandro Cesar de Melhado e Lima's avatar
Leandro Cesar de Melhado e Lima
Brass Contributor
May 26, 2026

Hi Shardul,

Great question, and this is actually one of the most important distinctions in this entire retirement topic.

Based on the information I’ve gathered from Microsoft (including official replies and partner-level discussions), the impact depends primarily on where the SharePoint site is hosted, not just how it was created.

In your scenario:

  • Your PWA site collection → will become unavailable after retirement
  • Your project sites created as subsites under a separate (non-PWA) site collection → this is a different case

If your project sites are truly hosted under a separate SharePoint site collection (not tied to the PWA site collection), then there is a strong indication that they are not directly impacted by the PWA retirement itself.

However, there is an important nuance:

Factual (confirmed based on Microsoft guidance):

  • SharePoint sites that are linked to Project Online and part of the PWA site collection will become unavailable after retirement

Hypothesis (to validate in your environment):

  • If your project sites are:
    • Hosted under a completely independent SharePoint site collection
    • Not structurally dependent on the PWA site collection
      Then they may continue to exist after retirement

Risk to consider (very important):
Even if the site physically remains available:

  • Any integration with Project Online (links, workflows, provisioning logic, metadata sync, navigation) will break
  • Some project-specific features may stop working or become orphaned
  • There is no explicit official Microsoft statement confirming long-term support for this hybrid scenario

So while the site itself may survive, its functional context as a “project site” may not.

Recommendation:

To reduce risk, I strongly suggest you:

  1. Validate if those sites are truly independent at the site collection level
  2. Identify any dependency on Project Online services (metadata, navigation, workflows, automation)
  3. Plan to treat them as standalone SharePoint sites going forward
  4. If they are business-critical, consider validating this behavior with Microsoft support for your tenant

In short:

  • PWA site collection → definitely goes away
  • External SharePoint site collections → likely remain, but with functional limitations and no guarantees

Hope this helps clarify your scenario.