Custom GPTs Are Being Retired: What OpenAI Said, and What to Do With Yours

If you built a custom GPT, or you open one every day, it has an end date and it is now the same date for everyone. OpenAI's custom GPT retirement FAQ, rewritten on October 26, 2026, says it plainly: "Custom GPTs are scheduled to retire on Dec 11, 2026," and "the transition affects all ChatGPT plans." At that point "custom GPTs and their GPT pages become inaccessible." One group gets longer: FedRAMP workspaces and Enterprise workspaces "with a qualifying, approved deferral" retire on February 11, 2027 instead. Your GPTs keep working until then, published ones can be moved into a plugin, and your old conversations with them survive retirement.

Key Takeaways

• The date is December 11, 2026, on every plan. OpenAI's FAQ: "Custom GPTs are scheduled to retire on Dec 11, 2026." Its timeline calls that the "standard scheduled retirement."
• One exception, and it is not a consumer one. "FedRAMP workspaces and affected Enterprise workspaces with a qualifying, approved deferral have a retirement date of Feb 11, 2027. This later date does not apply to every workspace." If you pay OpenAI personally, December 11 is your date.
• This covers every plan. OpenAI: "The transition affects all ChatGPT plans."
• Your old chats are safe. This is new and it is the reassuring part: "Your existing conversations with custom GPTs will remain accessible after retirement. You don't need to take any action to preserve them." What disappears is the GPT itself: "custom GPTs and their GPT pages become inaccessible."
• Migration moves your instructions and your files, not everything. A GPT's instructions "become a skill within the new plugin," connected apps come along, and "the GPT's knowledge files are copied into the plugin's reference files." Custom actions and "the GPT's selected model" do not carry over.
• Only the creator or an admin can migrate a GPT, and only a published one. "Drafts cannot be migrated directly."
• Making new GPTs is now off almost everywhere. OpenAI's free-tier FAQ, re-read live on October 27, 2026, still says: "No. New GPT creation and publishing are not available on personal ChatGPT accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro." And in Enterprise it is no longer a plan: "New GPT creation ended on October 26, 2026 for affected Enterprise workspaces, with the exception of FedRAMP workspaces."
• This is the second GPT retirement in two months. OpenAI retired its official DALL-E GPT on August 30, 2026 and said at the time that user-created GPTs were unaffected. That has now changed.

The Retirement Timeline

OpenAI now publishes six dates under "Enterprise workspace guidance," read live on the FAQ on October 27, 2026. Two of them have already happened.

Those dates sit in the Enterprise section, but the retirement itself is no longer Enterprise-only: the FAQ's own answer to "When are custom GPTs retiring?" is "Custom GPTs are scheduled to retire on Dec 11, 2026," with no plan qualifier. What is still plan-specific is when you can migrate: "migration access may become available at different times," and OpenAI tells everyone to "follow your in-product notice." One detail reaches across plans: public GPTs built in an Enterprise workspace follow the Enterprise transition "even if you access them from a personal account or another workspace." What decides the date is where a GPT was made, not what you pay.

What OpenAI Actually Said

Two short paragraphs, and they are worth reading in full because the hedging is deliberate. Here is the September 11, 2026 entry, titled "Planned custom GPT retirement and migration to plugins," verbatim:

We're planning to retire custom GPTs across ChatGPT plans and provide a migration path to plugins, which can combine reusable instructions with connected apps. You can continue using existing GPTs until the retirement date that applies to you, subject to your permissions.

To prepare, review the GPTs you rely on and identify their creators and anyone who needs access. When migration becomes available, test migrated plugins and review sharing. Timing and availability may vary by plan and workspace; follow applicable notices and learn more about the planned retirement.

The release note carries no date. The dates are in the retirement FAQ it links to, set out above. The October 26 rewrite of that FAQ changed its answer about the GPT Store, and not in your favour. It used to say retired GPTs "leave the GPT directory" and that "migrated GPT links are planned to redirect to the replacement for people who have access." The redirect promise is gone. What the page says now is that "custom GPTs and their GPT pages become inaccessible," that "migration does not carry over the GPT's public sharing settings," and that it does not "automatically make its replacement available to everyone who used it." If you share a GPT with people, you have to hand them the replacement yourself.

Creation Is Already Gone, a Month Before the Announcement

If you tried to build a new GPT recently and could not, this is why, and OpenAI never announced it in a release note. Its free-tier FAQ, re-read live on October 27, 2026, answers the question directly and in the same words it has used since August:

Can I create a GPT as a Free tier user?

No. New GPT creation and publishing are not available on personal ChatGPT accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro. You can continue using existing GPTs. Editing an existing GPT still depends on your plan and permissions. GPT creation remains available in Business, Enterprise, and Edu workspaces when workspace settings and permissions allow it.

Read that against the article's title. It is filed as a free-tier FAQ, and the answer names Plus and Pro as well, which is why almost nobody paying $20 or $100 a month has seen it. Two archived captures, August 15 and August 22, 2026, carried the identical wording, and so does the live page more than two months later, so this is not a one-day draft.

The same FAQ adds one limit that catches people out: "GPT usage follows your current Free tier model limit." Hit that limit and "GPT access pauses until the limit resets."

So the order of events is: creation and publishing stopped on personal plans in mid-August 2026, OpenAI announced the wider retirement on September 11, 2026, and Enterprise creation ended on October 26, 2026. The September announcement was the second step, not the first.

What This Means for You

It depends on whether you made a GPT, use someone else's, or never touched them. The short version: if you built one, publish it and migrate it; if you only use other people's, the creator has to do the work.

Why OpenAI Is Doing This

Because plugins do what GPTs did plus the part GPTs could not: connect to a live service. A custom GPT was a saved bundle of instructions, and optionally some files you uploaded. OpenAI's description of a plugin is that it can "bring reusable instructions, reference files, and connected apps together," which is the same bundle with a working connection attached.

You can see the direction in what OpenAI has been shipping. Its September 2026 release notes add plugins for Zendesk and OneNote, a Data plugin for business data, and a Healthcare Public Data plugin, and its Health feature is itself managed under Settings then Plugins. The plugin directory is where OpenAI is putting everything now, and GPTs are the older idea it replaces.

That is a reasonable product argument. It is also a migration, and migrations lose things. OpenAI lists them itself: "GPT custom actions do not transfer through the migration workflow," "the GPT's selected model does not carry over," and "drafts and unpublished edits do not transfer." It also warns that "a migrated plugin may respond differently," so test a few familiar prompts before you rely on it. On custom actions it is blunt about the cost: "rebuilding the connection may require a custom MCP server and technical setup."

What You Should Do This Week

One thing, and it takes ten minutes. Open each custom GPT you actually rely on, and copy its instructions into a note you own. If you uploaded files to it, download them. That single step makes you immune to every version of this migration going badly, and it is worth doing whether or not you ever touch plugins.

Do not rebuild anything as a plugin by hand yet. OpenAI's migration button carries your instructions and your knowledge files across for you: "go to My GPTs and select Migrate to plugin for the GPT you want to migrate." On a personal plan, wait for the in-app notice. The exception is a GPT with custom actions: those "do not transfer through the migration workflow," so that part needs rebuilding either way.

Do not cancel ChatGPT Plus over this. Custom GPTs are one item on OpenAI's list of what Plus adds over the free plan, and the bigger ones -- file uploads, image generation, Projects, and the paid thinking levels -- are untouched. It is worth knowing that the GPT half of that list has already stopped working for new builds, though: OpenAI's help centre still lists custom GPTs under what Plus gives you while its free-tier FAQ says creation is off on Plus.

The bottom line: OpenAI is retiring custom GPTs on every ChatGPT plan and replacing them with plugins. The date is December 11, 2026, with February 11, 2027 for FedRAMP and approved Enterprise deferrals. Building new ones is already impossible on Free, Go, Plus and Pro, and ended in Enterprise on October 26. Your old conversations survive. Copy the instructions out of the GPTs you care about, publish any drafts, and migrate when ChatGPT offers it.

Corrections and Updates

October 27, 2026: OpenAI rewrote the retirement FAQ on October 26 and this page was quoting sentences it had deleted. Seven of the eight strings this page quoted from the FAQ return zero on the live body, which now redirects to the slug 20001519-custom-gpt-retirement-and-migration-faq and is stamped "Updated: yesterday". Four substantive changes: December 11, 2026 is now the retirement date for every plan rather than for Enterprise with others "may follow the same transition timeline"; a February 11, 2027 date appears for FedRAMP workspaces and approved deferrals; the Enterprise creation cutoff moved from September 25 (planned) to October 26, 2026 (ended); and the redirect promise for migrated GPT links is gone, replaced by a warning that migration "does not carry over the GPT's public sharing settings." One change is in your favour and this page did not have it: "your existing conversations with custom GPTs will remain accessible after retirement." The summary, Key Takeaways, timeline table, both reader tables, the FAQ answers and the bottom line are all corrected.

September 18, 2026: this page said OpenAI had published no retirement date and that we could not read its detail article. OpenAI's retirement FAQ gives December 11, 2026 for Enterprise, says other plans may follow, and says retired GPTs leave the GPT directory.

September 25, 2026 is the Enterprise creation cutoff, and OpenAI still calls it planned. We re-read the retirement FAQ on September 25, 2026. The newest archived copy is dated September 17, 2026 and its own "Updated" line puts the last edit at September 16, so nothing in it has moved since this page was written: the four dates, the "subject to change" caveat and the "other plans may follow" wording are all unchanged. OpenAI has published nothing confirming that creation actually ended on that date, so treat it as the plan rather than the event.