What Access Versions are Developers Using in 2025?
- Karl Donaubauer
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
This year, I organized two Access conferences: the English-language and therefore global online conference Access DevCon in April and the German on-site conference AEK in October. At both conferences, I asked the participating developers exactly the same questions about their versions. For this article, I combined this data from a total of around 170 responses to illustrate the situation in 2025.
Which versions of Access do you currently work with?
Access 365 is used by 76% of developers, giving it a clear lead. Far behind are the perpetual versions Access 2019 and 2016, which fell out of support in Oct 2025. Behind them, with almost 20%, is the evergreen Access 2010. The newer purchase versions Access 2021 and 2024 no longer achieve the usage figures that perpetual versions used to have. After many years of drumbeating by Microsoft, the subscription version has prevailed. These developments can also be seen in the changes over the last 5 years (only available for AEK):
Another question I always ask is about how "fixated" Access developers are on Access:
What percentage of your current database projects use Access as frontend/backend?
Access developers use Access files as their frontend in about 90% of cases, i.e., almost exclusively. This has not changed over the many years that I have been surveying this. The same applies to the proportion of Access files used as backends, which has always been around 40% or slightly above.
By the way, back in 2020 at AEK, I once asked about the other backend systems. Microsoft SQL Server was used a little less than Access, followed by mySQL, which was used only a quarter as often, and thus similarly often as eight other systems combined, led by PostgreSQL and Oracle.
Finally, for a few years now, I have also been asking about the distribution of the bit variants:
What percentage of your work is currently done with 32-bit and 64-bit Access?
Combining the conferences, 32-bit Access still leads slightly. In contrast to the other topics, there are greater differences here between the events and, presumably, regions of the world. At DevCon, 64-bit leads (44:55). At AEK, 32-bit clearly leads (61:39), whereby this also has moved towards 64-bit by 10% in the last two years.