SAP’s EU antitrust settlement, closed by the European Commission on July 10, 2026, resolves a maintenance-and-support investigation through binding commitments rather than a fine or a finding of wrongdoing, and it gives ECC customers more room to reshape S/4HANA migration timing.
What the SAP EU Antitrust Settlement Actually Changes
The commitments, effective globally across all current and future SAP customers on every on-premise product, run for 10 years from the Commission’s decision.
SAP fully waives the Reinstatement Fee for customers who return to SAP maintenance after a period of absence, and caps the Back-Maintenance Payment at the lower of 50% of the fees that would have been due for the off-support period or six (6) months’ worth of payments.
For old SAP products with a dedicated license listed in SAP Note 3776551, the back-maintenance payment is waived entirely.
Customers can also split an SAP landscape into separate Commercial Installations and assign a different support model, a different maintenance provider, or no maintenance and support at all to each one, without triggering license repricing.
SAP must process a landscape-split request within six (6) months, with the split taking effect on the next January 1, April 1, July 1, or October 1 after that period or SAP’s completion of processing, whichever comes first.
Why the December 2027 Deadline Still Matters
None of this removes the underlying clock. SAP’s mainstream support for ECC ends in December 2027, and customers can buy extended maintenance only through December 2030 by paying an additional two percentage points on their maintenance fees.
Adoption of the replacement product remains partial. Gartner figures cited by The Register show that in Q4 2024 only 39 percent of the roughly 35,000 SAP ECC customers worldwide had bought or subscribed to licenses to begin their S/4HANA transition.
Gartner’s own reading of the settlement is that it removes a false binary. Customers previously had to choose between rushing a complex S/4HANA or private-cloud migration before 2030 or staying on ECC with limited support under SAP’s Customer-Specific Maintenance.
Where Leverage Shifts for ECC Customers
Gartner frames the ruling as a strategic input to migration planning, not a cost play: its research argues premature modernization creates technical debt and cost overruns, and that heads of enterprise applications should use the new flexibility to buy preparation time rather than lock into cloud commitments before they are ready.
Third-party support is the clearest beneficiary. European retailer Kingfisher, which owns B&Q and Screwfix, had already told a Gartner conference it chose Rimini Street to support ECC 6.0 rather than migrate to S/4HANA, and the settlement removes contractual friction for customers considering the same route.
Forrester’s analysis after the settlement lands on the same point from a different angle: switching costs created by an ERP system already embedded as the operational backbone have historically been the vendor’s leverage, and this settlement narrows that gap by clarifying customers’ right to mix support providers by Commercial Installation.
The Commission’s own framing supports that reading. EC executive vice-president Teresa Ribera said the decision gives customers using SAP’s on-premise software more freedom to choose maintenance and support without unfair restrictions that raised costs and stifled competition.
What the Settlement Does Not Touch
SAP has been explicit that the ruling relates only to on-premise maintenance policies and does not extend to SAP’s cloud offerings, including RISE with SAP, the lift-shift-and-transform migration program SAP launched in early 2021 with cloud providers and third-party vendors.
That distinction matters because SAP’s commercial push toward Business Data Cloud, Joule, and Business AI runs through the cloud side of the portfolio, which keeps its existing pricing and lock-in structure untouched by this settlement.
Forrester also cautions that the case sets a precedent regulators can extend. It expects scrutiny of enterprise software vendors to broaden from maintenance practices into migration incentives, cloud portability, data access, and AI ecosystem dependencies, though none of that is decided yet.
The Register frames the settlement as a bargaining chip for holdouts rather than a trigger for a rush to third-party support, and the evidence available does not show how many ECC customers have acted on the new terms since July 10, 2026.
What to Verify Before Changing Your Migration Plan
| Provision | Prior practice | Commitment after July 10, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Reinstatement fee | Charged to customers resuming SAP support | Fully waived |
| Back-maintenance payment | Not capped under prior policy | Capped at the lower of 50% of off-support fees or six (6) months’ payments |
| Landscape split | All-or-nothing support across the landscape | Split into Commercial Installations with independent support choices |
| Commitment duration | Not applicable | Legally binding for 10 years |
Before adjusting a migration roadmap, confirm three things with your own account team: whether your installed products qualify as not technically integrated under SAP Note 3776551 for a landscape split, the exact Back-Maintenance Payment your contract would owe under the 50%-or-six-months cap, and whether extended ECC maintenance to December 2030 still carries the additional two percentage points on your specific agreement.
Also confirm the split-request timeline in writing: SAP commits to processing a landscape split within six (6) months, with effect only on the next quarterly start date, which can extend a mid-negotiation move by up to two quarters depending on when the request lands.
The commitments give ECC customers a documented, ten-year floor on how SAP can price a return to support or a landscape split, but they do not extend to cloud contracts, and whether third-party providers see a real volume shift as a result is not yet established in the public record.