Lifetime License after paying year

I recently paid for the one year's access to Matlab student, but I am considering paying for the lifetime academic access.
If I went through with it, would the price for the lifetime license be reduced based on my already paid for year's access?
Or would it just be more reasonable to wait until my year expires to purchase it?

1 Comment

dpb
dpb on 16 Feb 2026
Edited: dpb on 16 Feb 2026
Call Mathwork Sales support and ask.
The Answers forum isn't a formal, official Mathworks support site but volunteers and have no authority to speak on such. Even Mathworks staff who do observe won't comment/answer such queries other than refer to Sales or the official link.

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Answers (1)

As far as I know, payment for one license type cannot be used as credit for another license type.
If you paid for the Student version within the last 30 days, you can get a refund for it.
However, note that students cannot purchase academic versions: those have to be purchased by university staff out of university accounts (including grants.)
Academic purchased are potentially "perpetual", which means that your university would gain the indefinite right to use that particular version of MATLAB (and any others released during the next 1 year.) Perpetual licenses do not include indefinite upgrade rights. And eventually, Mathworks will stop supporting the release you are using (and the very operating system you are using.) This is especially notable for Apple MacOS; official support for MacOS versions only lasts a small number of years.

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Asked:

on 16 Feb 2026

Answered:

on 16 Feb 2026

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