EC Decision on SAP Maintenance Policies

On 9 July 2026, the European Commission closed its antitrust investigation into SAP’s on-premise maintenance and support practices.

Case AT.40823 didn’t end in a ruling or a fine. The Commission instead accepted a set of commitments from SAP and made them legally binding worldwide for the next ten years.

For anyone advising SAP clients on contracts, licensing, or their future SAP landscape, this affects the decisions in renewal conversations.

The timing is awkward. Many clients are mid-decision about when, or whether, to move off ECC and onto S/4HANA, weighing the cost of staying put against the cost of migrating. A change to the terms governing maintenance and support changes that calculation.

This article covers the legal mechanism the Commission used, the specific practices that triggered the case, what SAP must now offer every customer, what it means for anyone choosing between Standard and Extended Maintenance, how it affects the wider SAP services market, and what it means for the people building careers and businesses around SAP consulting.

A Commitment, Not a Verdict

Under Article 9(1) of Regulation 1/2003, a commitment decision works differently from a standard antitrust ruling: the Commission sets aside its assessment of whether SAP breached Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, and accepts remedies SAP itself proposed, then makes those remedies enforceable in law. Reuters reported that SAP avoided a fine altogether by taking this route.

The commitments still have legal weight, though. A monitoring trustee will watch how SAP applies them over the coming decade, and if SAP breaches what it agreed to, the Commission can act and impose penalties without reopening the original investigation to prove wrongdoing from scratch.

A client, or a consultant advising one, who believes SAP is misapplying these terms has somewhere to go beyond SAP’s own internal process. The commitments name an independent monitoring trustee as the formal contact point for complaints about non-compliance, who reports directly to the Commission, so a client’s recourse doesn’t depend solely on SAP’s own internal process.

The investigation opened in September 2025. The decision was adopted on 9 July 2026. It runs for ten years, applies globally, and covers every current and future SAP customer across SAP’s on-premise product line.

RISE with SAP and S/4HANA Cloud sit outside its scope entirely, which we should keep in mind as the rest of this discussion proceeds.

The Four Practices Under Scrutiny

The Commission’s concern rested on four specific behaviors in SAP’s maintenance contracts, each of which restricted how customers could manage their own support spending.

The first was blocking customers from cancelling maintenance and support on licenses they’d stopped using: so organizations kept paying for “shelfware” indefinitely.

The second involved reinstatement and back-maintenance charges levied on customers who returned to SAP support after a gap, sometimes calculated as though the customer had never left at all.

The third was a pattern of extending the initial license term during which a customer couldn’t terminate maintenance, lengthening the lock-in period with each new purchase.

The fourth required customers to buy maintenance for their entire SAP on-premise estate from SAP alone, at one uniform pricing structure, closing off any option to mix providers or support levels across a landscape.

Taken together, these four practices raised the cost of leaving (or even partially leaving) SAP’s own support once a customer’s estate had grown large enough to make switching complicated.

That’s the whole case in summary, but the details are important.

What SAP Must Now Offer

The remedies SAP committed to match closely the four practices above, and they change what a consultant can now put on the table during a renewal or restructuring conversation.

Customers can now split their SAP landscape into separate parts, described in the commitments as commercial installations, and pick a different support arrangement for each.

Full SAP support might cover a core finance module while a legacy warehouse system nobody touches gets no support, or a third-party arrangement, instead. There’s no fee for the splitting itself and no repricing penalty triggered by doing it, though SAP’s commitments give itself up to six months to process a split request, taking effect the following January, so this is a planning decision rather than something a client can act on overnight.

Single-metric pricing contracts, which calculate maintenance fees against one straightforward measure rather than a tangle of custom metrics, are now more widely available, giving finance teams a simpler basis for forecasting costs as a business changes shape.

License termination rights have widened too. A customer can reduce licenses and related costs if headcount drops by ten percent or more over two years, or if the business faces insolvency, or divests part of itself and needs to split, transfer, or cancel the licenses tied to what’s sold. Reduced service levels during a product’s final maintenance phase now justify termination as well. These specific triggers are reported by independent coverage of the decision, though the fullest public detail on their exact mechanics sits with SAP and the Commission’s monitoring trustee.

Returning to SAP support after time away has become considerably cheaper. Back-maintenance is capped at whichever is lower between six months of fees or half the cost of the lapsed period, a defined list of older products carries no back-maintenance charge whatsoever, and the reinstatement fee itself, previously a real deterrent to lapsing support even briefly, has been dropped entirely.

SAP still holds other levers within these contracts, including an annual audit right on single-metric contracts to check actual usage against the agreed metric, and pricing terms on whatever scope of the estate remains under SAP support. What’s changed is better described as negotiated range within a firm commercial relationship than a wholesale loss of SAP’s advantage.

SAP has said its account teams will be briefed on all of this, and a formal clearing structure now exists for cases where a customer disputes how the rules are applied to their contract. That turns what used to be an informal negotiation into a documented, escalate-able process.

Standard versus Extended Maintenance

For clients currently paying Extended Maintenance premiums to keep an ECC system alive while the clock runs down toward SAP’s compatibility pack cutoffs, the landscape-splitting right changes the practical maths.

A finance module that’s frozen and unlikely to change again can drop SAP support entirely, while a warehouse or logistics system still under active development keeps it, all within the same estate and the same contract. Previously, that selective drop-off risked triggering repricing or reinstatement penalties across the whole landscape. Now it doesn’t.

That has consequences for the cost model consultancies have been building for clients for years, weighing the price of staying on ECC against the price of moving to S/4HANA sooner.

When partial support no longer carries a penalty attached, a longer, staged migration gets cheaper to run, which shifts the balance toward patience for clients who were previously pushed toward an earlier cutover mainly by contractual cost rather than by business readiness.

Jens Hungershausen, chairman of DSAG’s executive board, put the underlying point well when he said the flexibility helps customers decide for themselves how to proceed with systems that still deliver value, rather than being pushed to shut them down.

Keeping a system running because it earns its keep is different from keeping it running because leaving costs too much, and this is the first time in a while that SAP’s own contract terms have let a client separate the two.

Two things are worth flagging before moving on.

Customers running bespoke, custom-negotiated legacy contracts should confirm directly with SAP whether these terms apply automatically or require an active amendment, since that detail isn’t settled in anything published so far.

And for clients already partway into RISE or S/4HANA Cloud, these rights only reach the on-premise portion of what remains. The cloud side of a hybrid estate is outside this decision altogether.

Commercial Consequences

Maintenance and support fees have long been one of SAP’s steadiest and highest-margin revenue lines, because switching away from them was expensive and cumbersome. Giving customers more room to reduce, split, or pause that spending without penalty puts new pressure on that line, regardless of how the change gets framed publicly.

The more interesting story is one level up, in how this redefines competition for maintenance spend.

SAP’s own support organization, its partner network, and independent AMS and third-party maintenance providers are all now competing for the same maintenance budget, with less contractual friction standing between a customer and whichever one it chooses.

Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice-president overseeing this case, said the commitments should serve as a warning against similar practices in the cloud markets, where customers are increasingly moving. That’s a signal, direct from the Commissioner who made this decision, that RISE and S/4HANA Cloud contracts could face comparable scrutiny down the line, even though today’s decision doesn’t touch them.

What This Means for SAP Consultancies, Consultants, and the Talent Market

A review of a client’s maintenance contract against these new terms is now a distinct piece of paid work in its own right. Most clients won’t run that review unaided, and most haven’t yet worked out what these terms mean for their specific estate, which makes this a natural addition to any licensing or AMS practice’s service list rather than something bundled quietly into a broader engagement.

Blended support arrangements are commercially workable in a way they weren’t before. The old contract terms made mixing SAP support with third-party or self-managed support across a landscape expensive and awkward to justify. That barrier is largely gone now, and consultancies capable of designing and running a mixed-support landscape, rather than simply recommending one vendor over another, have a genuinely new service to sell.

The removed reinstatement and back-maintenance penalties belong in every total cost of ownership model built for a client weighing migration timing. Staying longer on a partially supported ECC estate costs less and carries less risk than it did before 9 July 2026, and any advice given without accounting for that is already out of date.

There’s no deadline within the ten-year term for a client to act on any of this, which sounds reassuring but tends to mean nothing happens until something forces the issue. The better advice is to raise it at whatever contract touchpoint comes next naturally, a renewal, a license true-up, a divestiture, rather than waiting for a crisis to prompt the conversation.

The change most relevant to anyone building a career in this space is a move in demand away from pure build and migration skills toward commercial and governance skills: SAP licensing literacy, software asset management, multi-vendor landscape governance, and contract negotiation. Given the ten-year term attached to this decision, that’s a change with staying power rather than a short-lived spike tied to one announcement.

Consultancies that start building the same commercial fluency around RISE and S/4HANA Cloud contracts now, ahead of any future decision covering cloud terms, will be a step ahead of the ones who wait for the Commission to force the issue a second time.

How Maintenance Stands Now

Maintenance contracts have stopped being background paperwork handled once a year at renewal. They’re now a live lever in how clients plan their S/4HANA transitions, and consultancies that treat them that way, building the review, the blended-support design, and the cost model into their standard advice, will offer better guidance than the ones still treating this as a legal footnote rather than a commercial opening.

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