Wave goodbye to these features...

Read time: 5 minutes

Hey there! Mia here. My Mom turned 65 last week (she’s never seen a Workday tenant but reads every newsletter anyway). Happy birthday Mom! 🎉

And well—she’s not the only one getting ready to retire 😉

Today, we’re spotlighting an often overlooked release element…

Retirements 👵🏻

There’s so much newness to digest with each Workday release, we often forget to consider how retiring features and functionality may impact setup and processes.

Read today’s newsletter, and sleep easy knowing you’ve now got 2025R1’s retirements on radar 😎

You’ll also gain a broader understanding of how Workday runs its retirements in general!

Did you miss our other 2025R1 newsletters? No sweat! You can revisit them here…

Ready to see what’s retiring? Let’s get to it…

🦅 A bird’s eye view of retirements

First, a quick refresher from our 2025R1 data analysis we sent out several week ago…

Workday buckets release items into 4 different categories:

Features: New or significantly updated functionality. This is the meat of the release! Features are either automatically available, or require additional setup or opt-in.
Fixes: Updates that fix broken or buggy existing functionality. These are automatically available.
Retirement: Removal of existing functionality. Workday phases out old components as of a predetermined retirement date. Out with the old, in with the new!
Coming Soon: Announcements for upcoming functionality. These items are recategorized as Features when Workday is ready to deploy them.

Today, we’re focused on retiring functionality.

As of today, Workday’s Release Center reports 38 upcoming retirements tied to 2025R1. These retirements begin this Friday, March 14th, and phase out through September 13th later this year.

Before we go further, there are two things you should keep in mind when it comes to the timing of retirements…

Retirements are always happening: Workday retires functionality throughout the entire year—not just around releases.
Retirement dates often change: Quite often, Workday pushes out retirement dates—sometimes with little to no warning. This gives you more time to prepare.

Retirements are always happening…

Right now, Workday lists a total of 209 retirements in its Release Center. These range from items that have already retired as early as 2024R1 all the way out to items slated to retire with 2027R1 🤯

Check out this data…

Targeted retirements over the span of 3 years! (2024R1 - 2027R1)

You can see that Workday staggers its retirements over the 6 months between each release, gradually phasing out functionality throughout the year rather than just around release time.

Retirement dates often change…

Take a look at the bottom of this Release Note…

Workday pushed the retirement date out by a year and half! 🤯 This isn’t uncommon.

For retirements that are highly impactful (e.g., a business process), retirement dates are often announced, then later pushed out. From our point of view, this helps move customers toward adopting new functionality, while also ensuring folks are adequately prepared once the item officially retires.

Stay in the know by keeping an eye on customer alerts for key updates on shifting retirement dates 👀

🔎 What’s on its way out with 2025R1?

So, what’s actually retiring with 2025R1? Let’s take a look!

We grouped 2025R1’s 38 retiring items by functionality type to help you gauge what‘s included in this release’s retirements…

Together, report fields, delivered reports, and a report data source make up nearly 60% of retiring functionality (we’re helping you out with this shortly, keep reading 😉). That’s quite a bit!

And here are this release’s retirements by Product Area…

Following 2025R1 release trends overall, Workday Student tops the chart!

📊 Retiring reporting functionality…

As promised, so you don’t have to dig through all the Release Notes yourself, here are quick summary tables on retiring report fields, delivered reports, and one report data source.

Use the Retired Report Fields In Use report to check if and where retiring fields are used across your tenant. This report gives you replacement fields as well so you can easily update your reports, integrations, etc.

✏️ Note that once a field is retired, it’s removed from this report—so make sure you replace each field before its retirement date listed in the table!

Retiring report fields…

Retiring delivered reports…

And one retiring report data source (RDS)…

The Currency Conversion Rates (Index Disabled) (Do Not Use) RDS retires on March 15, 2025. It’s replaced with the new Indexed Data Source - Currency Conversion Rates RDS which includes a Valid Currency Conversion Rates data source filter. This RDS lives within the Financial Management module.