Last updated August 19, 2026 · Reviewed by the VPN Super Team

That single licensing change still trips people up five years later, because the show spent more than a decade on US Netflix and search habits move slower than streaming contracts do. Here's what actually happened, when it happened, and what it means depending on where you live and what you already subscribe to.

When did The Office leave Netflix in the US?

The Office (US) left Netflix in the United States on January 1, 2021. NBCUniversal had been building Peacock since its April 2020 launch and used the show, its best-performing acquired title on Netflix at the time, as the anchor to pull subscribers onto its own service.

The most recent chapter in that story: the ninth and final season of The Office: Superfan Episodes (a re-cut version of the original series with extended scenes and bonus footage) premiered exclusively on Peacock on January 26, 2026, closing out an extended-cut format Peacock had been building out season by season since it first launched the show.

Why did NBCUniversal pull The Office from Netflix?

Peacock needed a title with a built-in audience, and The Office was one of the most-streamed shows on Netflix in the years before it left, regularly turning up on year-end most-watched lists. NBCUniversal owns the show outright through Universal Television, so once it decided to compete with Netflix directly instead of licensing content to it, The Office was the obvious anchor to bring home.

The same pattern played out across the industry around the same period: Friends moved to Max, The Big Bang Theory moved to Max, and most major studios pulled their libraries back to their own platforms once those platforms existed. The Office was simply NBCUniversal's version of that move, and its biggest one. It's also why searching for other 2000s-era network sitcoms on Netflix increasingly turns up the same answer: the studio that made the show usually wants it on its own service now, not a competitor's.

Is The Office on Netflix outside the United States?

In some countries, yes, though the exact list shifts and Netflix doesn't publish it anywhere official. The US exit didn't touch international licensing, which NBCUniversal negotiates separately, market by market, and renews or drops on its own schedule, independent of the US deal.

That means a country that has the show on Netflix today isn't guaranteed to have it next year, and a country that doesn't have it today could pick it up later. If this matters to you, the only source that's actually current is Netflix's own catalog inside your account's region. Searching there will tell you more reliably than any list a blog post can publish and then forget to update.

Streaming rights work this way for almost every studio-owned show, not just this one. A network or studio typically sells a series to Netflix for a set number of years in each territory, and those contracts don't all start or end on the same date. That's why a show can be present in one country's Netflix catalog and absent from a neighboring one, with no pattern a casual search will reveal.

Is the Netflix version of The Office the same show as the UK version?

No, and this mix-up shows up constantly in search results. There are two separate shows called The Office:

Netflix's catalog can list either or both depending on your region, and almost every search for "is the office on Netflix" means the US version. If a Netflix search in your country turns up short six-episode seasons, that's the UK original, not the show that moved to Peacock.

What do you actually get with a Peacock subscription?

All nine seasons of The Office (US) are on Peacock, along with the Superfan Episodes described above. Peacock runs two tiers: Premium (with ads) and Premium Plus (ad-free). Both just got more expensive. NBCUniversal raised prices across every plan on August 18, 2026. New subscribers see the new pricing immediately; if you subscribed before August 18, 2026, you keep your current rate until your next billing date on or after September 17, 2026.

Annually, that's still cheaper than paying month to month either way. If The Office is the only reason you'd subscribe, it's worth weighing a month of Peacock against buying the seasons outright from a digital retailer, which can work out cheaper if you're not planning to use Peacock for anything else once you've finished the show.

Should you subscribe to Peacock now, or wait for The Office to come back to Netflix?

Nothing suggests NBCUniversal plans to relicense the show back to Netflix in the US. Peacock has built five years of exclusive content around it, including a new Superfan Episodes season as recently as January 2026, which points to a long-term exclusive rather than a temporary licensing gap. A quick way to decide what to do:

How do you keep your streaming connection private while you watch?

This part has nothing to do with which shows are licensed where. It's about the network you're on while you watch whatever you're already paying for.

Public Wi-Fi at a hotel, airport, or coffee shop is shared with everyone else on that network, and it's a common target for traffic snooping. A streaming VPN encrypts your connection before your video traffic leaves your device, which matters more on networks you don't control than on your own home Wi-Fi.

Some ISPs also throttle streaming traffic during peak hours to manage bandwidth, which can show up as buffering that has nothing to do with your subscription or your actual internet speed. Encrypting the connection stops your ISP from identifying streaming traffic specifically, so it can't selectively slow that traffic down.

The same logic applies at home, not just when you're traveling. A shared apartment, dorm, or roommate network is still a network you don't fully control, even if it never leaves the building. If your streaming has been oddly slow at certain times of day, an encrypted connection at least rules out selective throttling as the cause, which narrows down whether the problem is your Wi-Fi router, your ISP, or Peacock's own servers having a rough night.

Bottom line

The Office (US) is a Peacock exclusive in the United States, and has been since January 1, 2021. There's no legitimate free option in the US right now, and nothing points to that changing. If you're outside the US, check Netflix's catalog in your own account before assuming either way, since the international list changes and isn't something any single article can keep current for you.