Office 365 Personal license transfer to a new computer

New laptop arriving and my Office 365 Personal subscription lives on the old one. Years of perpetual license trauma make me nervous about transfers.

What is the actual process and does the old trauma even apply?

The trauma does not apply, happily: subscription Office transfers by signing in, the license living in your Microsoft account rather than in any machine and the whole process is three calm steps plus one optional tidy up.

1

On the new laptop sign in at account.microsoft.com with the Microsoft account holding the subscription, open the Services and subscriptions section and click Install Office beside the 365 Personal entry. The installer downloads and runs.

2

Open any Office app when the install finishes and sign in with the same account when prompted. Activation is that sign in, no keys, no phone calls, none of the old rituals.

3

Verify by the account name showing in the app's top corner and File, Account reporting Subscription Product, Microsoft 365 Personal, the confirmation the license attached.

4

The optional tidy up: Personal permits your handful of simultaneous sign ins, five devices signed in at once under current terms, so the old laptop needs no ceremony while it still exists. When it leaves your hands though, sign out of Office on it or, more thoroughly, remove the device from your account's Devices page at account.microsoft.com, the hygiene that matters more for the account than the license.

The trauma's actual home, for closure: perpetual licenses, Office 2016 or 2019 bought outright, are the ones married to installs with transfer rituals and anyone still carrying one of those alongside the subscription should keep its product key documented. The subscription's files need no moving either, documents in OneDrive appearing on the new laptop at first sign in and local documents traveling by whatever machine migration you run anyway. The license itself, the part that used to hurt, follows the account automatically.

Installed, signed in, activated, verified, fifteen minutes including the download. Removed the old laptop from the devices page since it goes to my nephew next week. The trauma is hereby retired alongside the perpetual licenses that caused it.