Setting time limits on your courses or learning programs can help manage access, encourage timely completion, and maintain content relevance.
In this article, we will learn how to set an expiration date for courses and learning programs by following a few steps.
To set up the expiration date of a course or learning program:
1. Navigate to the course or learning program you want to change and click on the Access tab.
2. Locate the Course/ Program expiration section of your course.
3. Choose expiration date. Click the drop-down menu to set the duration, days, weeks, months, or years that your course will be accessible to your users.
4. Click on Save.
How Expiration Works
The expiration period for a product starts on the day a user is enrolled.
For example, if a course is set to expire in one month, the expiration countdown begins on the day of enrollment and runs for 30 or 31 days, depending on the calendar month. February is treated as a 30-day month for consistency.
Where Expiration Applies
Expiration dates are available only at the course and learning program levels. This means subscriptions do not support expiration dates.
If a course with an expiration date is part of a learning program, that expiration won’t apply when users access the course through the program. Only the program’s expiration date matters—and only if one has been setRegaining Access After Expiration
To give access to an expired course while preserving user progress such as exams, scores, you can:
1. Manually unenroll and re-enroll them in the course.
When manually enrolling users, you can assign a default expiration date across multiple products or specify separate expiration dates for each course or program.
Select the program you want, and then you can set a default expiration date for the selected products or set a separate expiration for each product.
2. Provide a 100% discount offer so they can re-enroll on their own. Here you can check how to create a URL with a coupon code already applied.
3. Extend the expiration date from the User's page. Open the user's profile, select the product for which you want to update the expiration date, and click Edit Expiration Date. This change will apply only to that specific user.
Important Considerations
- Changing or adding an expiration date to a course will not retroactively affect users who are already enrolled. Their original expiration timeline—if any—remains unchanged.
- For creators using payment plans, if a course expires while the user is still making payments, recurring charges through Stripe will continue unless manually canceled. This separation between billing and access should be managed carefully to avoid confusion or support issues.
- Course expiration does not apply when the course is offered through a subscription plan.