The Hidden Costs of Delaying Your SAP S/4HANA Migration

The percentages themselves are less important than what they represent: a recurring charge, indefinitely, for a system that is receiving no new capability whatsoever. Extended maintenance provides security patches and limited legal updates — it does not provide new features, and it does not reduce the underlying complexity of the landscape. An organization paying an extended-maintenance premium for three or four years and using none of that time to actively de-risk its eventual migration has, in effect, purchased several years of standing still at a markup.

SAPinsider’s 2025 benchmark research offers a useful proxy for how this dynamic is already playing out across the SAP customer base. Among the organizations surveyed, high project cost was the most-cited barrier to migration, named by 62% of respondents, followed closely by concerns about project length and duration at 55% — a figure that had risen sharply from 37% just a year earlier. Complexity of the existing implementation was cited by 43%, and concern about future on-premise licensing by 36%.

That rising concern about duration is the structural cost of delay made visible. As the 2027 mainstream- maintenance deadline approaches, the population of organizations still needing to migrate compresses into a shorter remaining window, competing for the same finite pool of experienced implementation partners, specialist consultants, and internal change capacity. A migration planned calmly over eighteen to twenty-four months looks structurally different from the same migration compressed into the final year before a support deadline — not because the technical work has changed, but because testing gets abbreviated, change management gets rushed, and data-cleansing gets treated as a checkbox rather than a discipline. None of those compressions show up as a separate line item on an invoice. They show up later, as post-go-live defects, adoption problems, and rework.