Palo Alto Networks publishes a tidy hardware life cycle: an end-of-sale date, then five years of support, then end of life, when PAN-OS releases and threat updates stop. Tidy, but easy to lose track of, because the official page lists whole series rather than the model on the label in your rack.
Our free Palo Alto end-of-life checker fixes that: type the actual model, PA-220, PA-850, PA-3260 or any of seventy PA models, and get its dates and upgrade options in seconds.
The dates worth knowing right now
A few from the official list stand out in 2026. The PA-7000 series chassis stopped being sold at the end of December 2025. The PA-5450 was announced for retirement in May 2026 and stops selling this November. The K2-series 5G firewalls reached full end of life in February 2026. And the once-ubiquitous PA-220 branch box stopped selling back in 2023, with support ending in January 2028: still patched today, but the clock is running.
Meanwhile Palo Alto launched new PA-500 and PA-5500 series in September 2025, so several of the “recommended replacement” answers changed recently too. The checker resolves all of that, following each replacement chain to models you can actually buy.
Four ways forward
Like our FortiGate checker, the tool doesn’t just deliver bad news. For any retired model you get:
- The current Palo Alto replacement, straight from the official recommendations.
- The FortiGate equivalent, sized like for like, if you’re weighing a vendor change at renewal time.
- The UniFi option for smaller sites that mainly need routing, VLANs, VPN and intrusion prevention without annual licences.
- SASE, and for a Palo Alto estate this one is especially natural: Prisma Access delivers the same security stack from the cloud, with zero-trust access for every user and site and no edge box to age out next time.
We’ll give it to you straight
We deploy and support Palo Alto, Fortinet and UniFi as part of our network services, monitored 24×7 by our network operations centre. So check your model, and if a date surprises you, talk to us: we’ll compare a like-for-like refresh against the alternatives with real numbers, not a sales pitch.
