The Encompass SDK Sunset Timeline, Verified (July 2026)
If you’ve researched the Encompass SDK retirement, you’ve probably seen three different deadlines — October 2025, May 2026, December 2026 — quoted on different vendor sites, sometimes all three at once. That’s because ICE Mortgage Technology has revised the schedule twice, and much of the content ranking for this topic was written before the revisions and never updated.
Here is the timeline as it actually stands, with sources.
The current schedule
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| November 1, 2025 | Feature freeze took effect — no new SDK features, maintenance and support only. (In effect now.) |
| December 31, 2026 | Transition deadline for the Encompass SDK and legacy service ordering. |
| January 1, 2027 | Continued SDK use requires ICE-approved “Transitional Access,” with monthly fees accruing from this date. |
As of this writing (July 2026), the SDK still works — nothing has been disabled. But the deadline is under six months away, and the SDK has been in run-off maintenance for over eight months.
How we got here
September 2024 — the announcement. ICE announced it would sunset the legacy SDK, originally planned for October 31, 2025, with the Encompass API (Developer Connect) as the replacement (National Mortgage News).
October 2024 — the first revision. After client feedback, ICE added a six-month no-charge grace period following the October 2025 date, with per-unit SDK fees to begin in May 2026 (Scotsman Guide). If you see “May 2026” or “$0.50 per unit” on a vendor site, it’s quoting this superseded plan.
August 2025 — the extension. ICE pushed the transition deadline for both the SDK and legacy service ordering to December 31, 2026, froze new SDK features as of November 1, 2025, and replaced the per-unit fee plan with approval-gated Transitional Access carrying monthly fees from January 2027 (National Mortgage News).
What “transition deadline” actually covers
The December 31, 2026 date covers two distinct things, and lenders regularly plan for one while forgetting the other:
- The Encompass SDK itself — desktop plugins, Smart Client customizations, batch automations, and anything else your team (or a past vendor) built against the SDK.
- Legacy service ordering — the old-style vendor integrations for appraisal, title, flood, verifications, and similar services. These move to Encompass Partner Connect (EPC).
Custom desktop input forms are part of the same modernization story: they don’t carry over to Encompass Web and need to be rebuilt as web input forms.
Can’t we just pay the fees and wait?
Technically, yes — that’s what Transitional Access is for. But look at what you’d be paying for: special-approval access to a platform that stopped receiving new features in November 2025, with fees that recur monthly and a vendor ecosystem actively moving to EPC. Every service provider that completes its EPC migration is one more integration that may stop supporting its legacy path regardless of what you pay ICE.
Transitional Access is a bridge for lenders who started late. It is not a strategy.
What to do with six months left
- Inventory first. You cannot scope what you haven’t counted. List every SDK plugin, custom input form, business-rule automation, and legacy service order integration in your instance. (Most lenders find dependencies they didn’t know they had — a departed admin’s batch job, a vendor’s plugin, a form nobody remembers commissioning.)
- Risk-rank the list. What breaks loan production the day it stops working goes first. Nice-to-have internal tooling goes last.
- Migrate component by component. Rebuild each item on Developer Connect APIs or EPC, run it in parallel against the SDK version, and cut over when outputs match. No big-bang weekend cutovers.
- Don’t wait for Q4. Migration engineering capacity across the ecosystem is finite, and every lender that procrastinated is competing for it in the same final quarter.
This is exactly the work we do — SDK migration assessments and fixed-scope rebuilds. The assessment is free and the written inventory is yours to keep, whoever you build with.