QuickBooks Online Tags Are Being Retired: Migration to Custom Fields Explained
QuickBooks Online is retiring tags in phases through May 2028, and users must move their tracking into custom fields before tags vanish for good.
QuickBooks Online users who track spending with tags are now working against a deadline the vendor set in stages. New tag creation ended on May 16, 2025. Existing tags survive until May 19, 2028, and after May 15 of that year they vanish from historical transactions as well. The replacement, custom fields, is already live on both sales and expense forms.
The timeline comes from guidance published in the vendor’s help pages, including the Singapore English edition, and it frames the change as applying to QuickBooks Online plans generally. Here is what it means in practice.
The retirement follows a fixed timetable
Your position depends on whether you have ever used tags. Accounts with no tag history lose the option to start using them by May 19, 2025. Accounts with a tag history keep the feature until May 19, 2028.
Tag creation ended earlier, on May 16, 2025. Since that date, the software no longer offers a way to add tags. What it offers instead is a migration path: carry existing tags into a custom field, an option available on every QuickBooks Online plan.
Reporting dies last. Between May 16, 2025 and May 15, 2028, you can still see your tags and report on past transactions. After the cutoff, tags are removed from the product outright, and the vendor has described the removal as permanent. Anything not exported or migrated by then is gone.
Tags never touched the books
Tags sat apart from the formal accounting structure. They were flexible labels you attached to transactions for review, and they posted nothing to the General Ledger. A tag only shaped a report if you deliberately ran a Profit and Loss by Tag Group.
Classes and Locations behave differently; they feed the core financial statements directly. That lightness made tags popular for informal tracking: campaigns, properties, referral sources, job numbers. It also means the retirement carries no accounting risk in itself. Your books stay balanced. The lens you viewed them through is what goes away.
The migration runs through custom fields
As of March 17, 2025, custom fields work on both sales and expense forms across most plans, and the data types and value limits have grown. A single dropdown field can hold up to 100 values. Up to 60 existing tags can be loaded into one dropdown, so even a crowded tag list can collapse into a single custom field.
Plan limits decide how much you can carry
The number of fields varies sharply by subscription. The published limits are:
- Simple Start: one custom field per transaction, up from none.
- Essentials: four per transaction, up from three in total.
- Plus: four per transaction, also up from three.
- Advanced: twelve per transaction, unchanged.
All plans support dropdown lists. Text and number formats vary by subscription level.
Ledger users are left outside
QuickBooks Ledger gets none of this. The lightweight plan has no custom fields at all, and the announced changes do not apply to it. A Ledger subscriber who wants custom fields must upgrade to a fuller QuickBooks Online plan. There is a second catch: tags held in Ledger do not migrate, so upgrading alone will not rescue them.
Reporting once tags are gone
After migration, your grouping lives in field values, and reports filter on those values instead. If the Profit and Loss by Tag Group report has been part of your routine, treat the next few years as an archive window. Run and export the tag reports you might ever need while the option still exists.
Steps worth taking before the deadlines
Start with an audit, which is where we would begin. List every tag, mark the ones attached to real transactions, and retire the dead ones. Merge duplicates, because a cleaner list migrates into a cleaner dropdown.
Name the receiving fields with reporting in mind. Filter names are what you will live with afterward, and vague labels age badly.
Then plan the timing. Essentials and Plus users get four fields, Advanced users get twelve, and splitting a long tag list across several dropdowns keeps each one readable. Treat May 2028 as the hard wall it is. New tracking dimensions can no longer be tags at all, so anything you start measuring today is a custom field from the beginning.