It's Official: HSMWorks Is Dead on March 25, 2028

The rumors are settled and the date is not a guess anymore. Autodesk has confirmed that HSMWorks, the CAM that has run inside SOLIDWORKS for the better part of a decade, reaches end of life on March 25, 2028. New sales already stopped on March 25, 2025, which is why you cannot buy a fresh seat today no matter who you call. If your shop programs parts with HSMWorks, you now have a fixed deadline on the calendar and a decision that does not get easier by waiting. Here is exactly what Autodesk said, what it does to the seats and the CAM data you already have, and what a shop should be doing with the roughly twenty months that are left.

What Autodesk actually said

There is no need to lean on a reseller's paraphrase, because Autodesk lays it out in its own HSMWorks FAQ. Start with the end of sale, which is already behind us:

Existing customers keep access for a while longer, but the retirement itself is firm, and it does not bend around your Fusion subscription:

Read that middle sentence twice, because it closes the loophole most shops reach for first. Keeping a Fusion subscription alive past 2028 does not keep HSMWorks alive with it, since the entitlement is pulled on the date no matter what the parent subscription is doing. Autodesk is just as direct about why, saying it is "focusing on delivering more value through Autodesk Fusion" and has "been working over the last few years to include CAM capabilities in Fusion that exceed those available in HSMWorks." That is Autodesk's claim and Autodesk's strategy. It is also not your strategy, and the fact that Fusion is where Autodesk wants you does not make it where your shop belongs.

What March 25, 2028 actually does to your seats

The effect depends on how you hold the license, and the difference is worth getting right before you plan around it. If you are on a subscription, which is how HSMWorks has been sold since 2016, the entitlement is removed from your account on the date, and the download, access, or use language above applies to you directly. There is no grace period baked in beyond the date itself.

Genuine pre-2016 perpetual seats sit in a grayer area, because Autodesk has not clearly said whether an installed perpetual license keeps running unsupported or gets switched off. Do not build a plan on the hope that it keeps running. Even in the best case, a perpetual seat after the date gets no updates, no re-download, no guaranteed activation if you move to a new machine, and no plug-in support for future SOLIDWORKS versions, which means it is frozen to the exact version and computer it lives on now. The first time you replace a workstation or update SOLIDWORKS, that seat is a real risk.

There is one more access route worth naming, because a shop without a live subscription sometimes reaches for it. Autodesk Flex, the pay-as-you-go token option, keeps working for HSMWorks right up to the same date and no further. In Autodesk's own words, "on March 25, 2028, all access to HSMWorks will stop, including Flex access." Any Flex tokens you have not burned stay valid for other Autodesk products, but they expire one year from the date you bought them, so Flex is a way to reach HSMWorks occasionally before the deadline, not a way around it.

Education licenses are already gone

If you run HSMWorks on an education license, 2028 was never your date. Autodesk removed HSMWorks from its free education program in 2025, and educational users, including FIRST robotics mentors who depend on it for competition parts, reported their HSMWorks entitlements expiring with little warning, well ahead of the commercial deadline. The lesson for any shop or program still assuming a comfortable runway is simple: confirm your own entitlement's actual expiration instead of assuming the 2028 headline applies to your license type.

The fact that makes the deadline bigger than it looks

Here is the part that changes how urgent this really is. CAM toolpaths and machining setups do not transfer between systems, and there is no HSMWorks trade-in, converter, or data bridge that carries your programming into anything else. Your operations were built against a specific processor, your feeds and speeds live in your setup sheets and your head, and none of that follows a part into a new package. Whatever you choose, you re-program.

That quietly kills the most common instinct, which is to slide over to Autodesk Fusion because it feels like the smallest move. Going from HSMWorks to Fusion means rebuilding your CAM from scratch, exactly as much as moving to a SOLIDWORKS-side tool would, and a SOLIDWORKS file lands in Fusion as solid bodies rather than your feature tree. Since the re-programming bill comes due no matter what, the honest question is not what is closest to what you have, it is which home fits your shop for the next five years. That is a decision worth making deliberately, and there is a full breakdown of the options in HSMWorks is ending, what are your real CAM alternatives.

What's next for your shop

Twenty months sounds like plenty until you remember that a CAM switch is a re-training, a re-posting, and a rebuild of your tool library, done while you are still shipping parts every day. The shops that will handle this well are the ones that start now and treat it as a project, not a fire drill in early 2028. The move does not have to be a hard cutover, and it should not be.

Stand up the replacement in parallel while HSMWorks still runs, so your current programs keep making parts while a programmer gets comfortable in the new environment on real jobs. Rebuild your post and your setup library deliberately this time rather than importing a decade of accumulated workarounds. Phase the switch in job by job, and lean on the fact that NC Shop Floor Programmer may already be included with your SOLIDWORKS subscription if it carries cloud services, which makes a low-cost parallel trial straightforward. One piece of advice from years of watching these decisions get made or dodged: aim the conversation at the owner, not only the programmer, because the veteran who has run HSMWorks for a decade will resist the change, while the person who signed for the machines is the one who cares about throughput and about the shop still running when that programmer retires.

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