Retail, OEM and volume licences: what you are actually buying
Three keys can look identical, cost wildly different amounts, and behave nothing alike the day your computer dies.
Updated 2026-08-24
The three channels
Microsoft does not sell one kind of licence. It sells the same software through several channels, and the channel — not the key itself — decides what you are allowed to do with it. A key is just a string of characters; the entitlement behind it is what you are buying.
Every listing in a key shop belongs to one of these three, whether or not the shop tells you which.
- —Retail — sold to a person. Tied to you rather than to a machine, and transferable: you may move it to a new computer as long as it is only active on one at a time.
- —OEM — sold to a computer manufacturer and bound to the first machine it activates on. It dies with that motherboard. This is the licence on almost every prebuilt laptop.
- —Volume — sold to organisations under an agreement, in blocks, for machines they administer. It includes editions ordinary buyers never see, such as the LTSC builds of Office.
Why the difference only shows up later
All three activate the same way and produce the same working copy of Windows. The distinction is invisible until the day you replace a motherboard, move a drive into a new build, or reinstall after a hardware failure — and then a retail key carries over while an OEM key refuses.
This is the most common way a cheap key disappoints somebody. Nothing was broken and nobody was cheated: the licence did exactly what its channel says it does. The buyer simply was not told which channel they were buying.
How to tell what you already have
On a machine that is already activated, open a command prompt and ask Windows about its own licence:
- —slmgr /dli — prints the description of the current licence, which names the channel. Look for RETAIL, OEM or VOLUME_MAK in the output.
- —slmgr /xpr — tells you whether the activation is permanent or carries an expiry date.
What we sell, and what we say about it
Our Windows listings are retail licences, and each listing says so before you pay. That is the channel worth paying a little more for, because it is the one that survives a new machine.
The Office listings are perpetual releases — bought once, no subscription, no renewal date. Office Professional Plus 2021 is the LTSC build, which receives security fixes rather than feature changes; that is a feature on a machine you want behaving the same way next year.
We buy from surplus inventory and regional distribution rather than from Microsoft directly, which is why the price is what it is. We would rather write that down than let you assume otherwise.
Quick answers
- Can I move a retail Windows key to a new computer?
- Yes. A retail licence is tied to you rather than to the hardware, so it can be deactivated on the old machine and used on the new one. It may only be active on one computer at a time.
- Will an OEM key work after I replace the motherboard?
- Usually not. An OEM licence is bound to the machine it first activated on, and a motherboard replacement reads as a new machine. This is the difference people discover at the worst possible moment.
- How do I check whether my key is retail or OEM?
- Run slmgr /dli in a command prompt on the activated machine. The description it prints names the channel — RETAIL, OEM or VOLUME_MAK.
