What does LDoS mean for Cisco?

LDoS stands for Last Date of Support. It is the final milestone in Cisco's product lifecycle. After the LDoS date Cisco provides no further support of any kind for that product: no TAC assistance, no software or security updates, and no hardware replacement through RMA.

How long after end of sale is Cisco LDoS?

For hardware, Cisco typically provides five years of TAC support and five years of RMA replacement parts from the End of Sale date, so LDoS usually falls about five years after end of sale. Cisco also typically announces the end-of-life milestones around a year before the End of Sale date.

Is LDoS the same as end of life?

No. End of Life is the announcement that a product is being retired, and End of Sale is when you can no longer buy it. LDoS is the last day Cisco will support the product you already own, which is why LDoS rather than EoL is the date operations teams should plan around.

What happens if I run Cisco hardware past LDoS?

The device keeps running, but you cannot open a TAC case, cannot get a replacement through Cisco's RMA process, and will never receive another security fix. Any vulnerability disclosed after LDoS stays permanently open on that device.

Vendor EOL guides · Cisco · LDoS

Cisco LDoS: what Last Date of Support actually means

By Nico De Muynck · Updated July 19, 2026

Quick answer

LDoS stands for Last Date of Support. It is the final milestone in Cisco's lifecycle and the only one that genuinely matters once you already own the equipment. After LDoS, Cisco provides nothing: no TAC case, no software or security fix, no replacement part. For hardware it typically falls around five years after the End of Sale date.

Where LDoS sits in the chain

Cisco publishes a sequence of milestones per product, and people routinely plan against the wrong one. In order:

End-of-Life Announcement. The day Cisco tells the world the product is being retired, typically about a year ahead of End of Sale.
End of Sale (EoS). The last day you can buy it. Relevant to procurement, almost irrelevant to the box already in your rack.
End of Software Maintenance. The last date Cisco engineering releases bug fixes or maintenance software. The device is still supported, but it stops improving.
Last Date of Support (LDoS). The hard stop. Typically about five years after End of Sale, reflecting Cisco's usual five years of TAC support and five years of RMA replacement parts from EoS.

The full milestone set, including the service-contract dates, is covered in the main Cisco EOL guide.

Why LDoS is the date to plan around

End of Sale feels like the urgent date because it comes with a purchasing deadline, so it gets the attention. But End of Sale costs you nothing operationally. LDoS is where the risk actually lands, and it arrives roughly five years later, long after everyone stopped thinking about the announcement. That gap is precisely why Cisco estates drift: the alarm goes off early, the real deadline is years away, and nobody writes it down.

Treat End of Sale as the trigger to record the LDoS date, and LDoS as the date you plan the replacement for.

What actually stops at LDoS

TAC support. You cannot open a case. When a core switch misbehaves at 2am, there is no one to call.
Security and software fixes. Every vulnerability disclosed after LDoS stays open on that device permanently.
RMA replacement. No more parts through Cisco's replacement process, so a hardware failure becomes a scramble on the secondary market.

The device itself keeps forwarding traffic, which is exactly what makes this dangerous. Nothing visibly breaks on the day, so the risk accumulates quietly. That pattern is the subject of the five EOL risks.

Finding the LDoS date for your kit

Cisco publishes the milestone dates in the end-of-life bulletin for each product, indexed on the official Cisco end-of-life policy and notice pages. If you are starting from hardware you own rather than a product name, the practical route is a serial number lookup, which is covered step by step in how to check if a Cisco product is end of life.

Look up LDoS once. Get warned automatically.

Record each device's Last Date of Support in EOL Tracking and get told months ahead, by email, Slack or Teams.

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