FortiGate EOL 2026: 40F, 80F, 200F and 600E Dates

Two Clocks, Not One

Every few weeks someone asks us the same question in slightly different words: is the FortiGate 80F end of life? Or the 40F, or the 600E. It sounds like a question with a yes-or-no answer, and most of the pages that come back in search results treat it that way — a table of models, a column of dates, done.

In practice Fortinet runs two separate lifecycle clocks, and they rarely line up. One governs the appliance you bought. The other governs the FortiOS build running on it. A box can be perfectly supportable as hardware while the firmware on it has already stopped receiving fixes — and, less obviously, a model that is no longer sold can still have years of support left. Knowing which clock is actually running down on you is the difference between a planned refresh and an emergency purchase order.

The Hardware Clock: End of Order Plus Sixty Months

Fortinet's hardware lifecycle is anchored to the End of Order (EOO) date — the last day a model can be purchased. That is the milestone most people mean when they say a FortiGate is "EOL", but it is the beginning of the wind-down, not the end of it.

Under Fortinet's published policy, End of Support for hardware falls 60 months after the End of Order date. There is one more milestone worth putting in your calendar: the Last Service Extension Date (LSED), which sits 12 months before End of Support and is the final opportunity to buy or renew a support contract on that unit. Miss the LSED and the appliance keeps forwarding packets, but you cannot put a valid FortiCare contract on it — which usually also means no RMA and no TAC.

The FortiGate 600E is a good worked example, because it is one of the models people search for most. It went end-of-sale in October 2025. Applying the 60-month rule puts its End of Support in October 2030, with the last chance to extend a support contract around October 2029. So the honest answer to "is the 600E EOL?" is: yes, you can no longer buy one — and no, you are not in any danger yet. You have a refresh window measured in years, not weeks.

Contrast that with the F-series desktop and 1U models that generate most of the EOL search traffic. The 40F, 60F, 80F, 100F and 200F have no announced end-of-order date. As hardware, their clock has not started. If you own one of these and you are worried about EOL, the hardware table is not where your problem is.

The Software Clock: FortiOS Support Windows

The second clock is the one that actually catches most organisations out. FortiOS major releases get engineering support for 36 months from release, after which critical fixes continue for a further 18 months — giving a total support life of roughly 54 months from general availability.

Laid against the calendar, that produces a schedule worth checking your estate against:

• FortiOS 7.0 — released March 2021, end of support September 2025. Already past. Anything still on 7.0 is running unsupported firmware today.
• FortiOS 7.2 — released March 2022, end of support end of September 2026. That is this month. If you have 7.2 in production, this is the item to move to the top of the list.
• FortiOS 7.4 — released May 2023, engineering support to May 2027, end of support November 2028.
• FortiOS 7.6 — released July 2024, engineering support to July 2028, end of support January 2030.
• FortiOS 8.0 — released April 2026, engineering support to April 2029, end of support October 2030.

Read the 600E example again with this in mind. The hardware is supported until 2030, but if the unit is sitting on 7.2 it loses firmware support this month. The appliance is fine. The software on it is not. That is a patching project, not a procurement one, and it is far cheaper to treat it as such.

Dates move, and Fortinet occasionally extends a window. Before you commit budget, confirm the specific figures for your serial numbers on Fortinet's own Product Life Cycle portal at support.fortinet.com — it does not require a login to view.

The Third Constraint Nobody Searches For

There is a quieter limit that affects the smallest and most widely deployed models, and it is not on any EOL table: memory.

FortiGate models with 2 GB of RAM or less — which includes the 40F and 60F families and their variants — stopped supporting proxy-related features from FortiOS 7.4.4 onward, as part of Fortinet's work to reduce memory pressure on those platforms. The position has shifted slightly since: 7.6.5 restored proxy-based inspection for email protocols on these models, while from 7.6.6 most other proxy-related features remain unavailable.

The practical consequence is that a 40F or 60F can be entirely current on hardware, running a fully supported FortiOS build, and still be unable to do proxy-based inspection of the traffic you bought it to inspect. If your security policy depends on proxy mode rather than flow mode, that is a functional end of life even though the model appears "Active" everywhere you look.

You can confirm which side of the line a unit falls on from the CLI — run diagnose hardware sysinfo conserve and check the total RAM figure. A value below roughly 2000 MB puts the appliance in the 2 GB class.

What This Means When You Are Planning a Refresh

Put the three constraints side by side for each model in your estate and the decision usually makes itself:

• Hardware end-of-sale, support years away (600E, 400E, 500E, 300E, 100E and the rest of the E-series) — budget the replacement, but plan it across a financial year. Note the LSED, because that is the date that quietly removes your options.
• No announced hardware EOL, adequate memory (100F, 200F, 600F, and the G-series) — no lifecycle action needed. Keep firmware inside the supported window and move on.
• No announced hardware EOL, 2 GB memory (40F, 60F) — the model is fine; the question is whether the feature set still matches your policy. If it does not, this is a capability upgrade rather than an EOL replacement, and it should be justified on that basis.
• Anything on FortiOS 7.0 or 7.2 — treat as urgent regardless of hardware status.

For organisations buying in India, one more variable is worth building into the plan: lead time. Appliance availability, import timelines and the renewal cycle on FortiCare contracts mean the useful planning horizon is longer than the technical one. Discovering an LSED has passed at renewal time removes the cheap option and leaves only the expensive one.

If you want to check specific models quickly, our FortiGate EOL checker covers the current status and suggested upgrade path for every model in the range. For the firmware side — FortiOS upgrade sequencing, HA pairs, and getting off an unsupported build without an outage window you cannot afford — see our Fortinet lifecycle and upgrade services, and FortiCare and FortiGuard renewals in India for the contract side. If the outcome is a replacement, which FortiGate to buy works through sizing.