Lattice HRIS is gone. Not going, gone. Payroll access ended on 31 March 2026, HRIS access ended on 31 July, and reporting indicates customer data was permanently deleted on 6 August.
Almost every guide you will find on this shutdown was written for people who still had time. If you are reading this in August 2026 or later, you do not, and the advice you need is different. This page covers what is actually still available.
The timeline
| November 2025 | Lattice announces it is discontinuing HRIS and payroll |
| 31 March 2026 | Payroll access ends |
| April 2026 | A Rippling-formatted census export is added |
| 31 July 2026 | HRIS access ends permanently |
| 6 August 2026 | HRIS customer data reportedly deleted |
Roughly eight months of notice, which is more than plenty of vendors give. The sting is at the end of the list rather than the beginning.
One sourcing note, because it matters here. The 6 August deletion date and the detail that Lattice’s standard 180-day retention window does not apply to HRIS customers come from a single published guide. We have not seen that confirmed in a Lattice notice we can link to. If your data matters, treat it as a strong signal to go and check rather than as settled fact, and ask Lattice directly.
What did not shut down
Worth being precise, because the headline confuses people. Lattice the company is fine. Lattice discontinued its HRIS and payroll products and is refocusing on performance management, and the Talent Suite (reviews, goals, OKRs, 1:1s, engagement surveys, compensation planning) carries on. Existing customers have been offered discounts on it.
So if you use Lattice for performance reviews, nothing happened to you. If you used it as your system of record for people and pay, everything did.
If you exported before 31 July
Check what you actually got, because CSV exports are where this goes wrong quietly. The admin panel covered People, Time Off, Time Tracking, Goals, Updates, Engagement and Custom Reports. What tends to be thin or missing:
- Uploaded documents. Signed offer letters, policy acknowledgements, visa and I-9 paperwork. These rarely come out in a row-per-employee CSV, and they are the ones you cannot recreate.
- Historical effective dates. A current-state export gives you today’s salary and title. It does not always give you the compensation history behind them, which is what you need for pay equity analysis and for anyone asking about promotions three years ago.
- Terminated employees. Exports frequently default to active staff. Your retention obligations do not.
- Time-off balances mid-accrual. A balance is a calculation, not a fact. Check that the accrual rules came with the number.
Open the files. Do not assume a download that completed is a download that is complete.
If you did not export
Do these in order, today.
- Contact Lattice support in writing and ask directly. Ask whether any copy of your data still exists, in any system, including backups, and ask them to answer in writing. A deletion date published in a third-party guide is not the same as a confirmed irreversible deletion of your tenant. This is a five-minute email and it is the only step that could recover everything.
- Reconstruct from the systems that were downstream of Lattice. This is where most of your data actually still lives. Your payroll provider holds pay history. Benefits carriers and your 401(k) administrator hold enrolment, dependants and deduction records. Your ATS holds hire dates and offer details. If anything was piped out over SFTP, the destination still has it. If you ran that Rippling census export in April, that file is a census.
- Check your own accounting system. Payroll journal entries in the general ledger will reconstruct compensation history further back than most people expect.
- Then worry about the new HRIS. Counterintuitive, but recovery is time-sensitive and vendor selection is not.
The part nobody puts in the migration guides
Losing payroll records is not only an operational problem. Employers in the US have statutory retention obligations: broadly, three years for payroll records under the FLSA and four years for employment tax records under IRS rules, with state requirements layered on top and longer clocks for some categories. Those obligations sit with you, not with the vendor who deleted the database.
If you have gaps, that is a conversation to have with your employment counsel now rather than at your next audit. We are a change feed, not a law firm, and this is the point where you want a real one.
Where people went instead
CopperFeed does not rank tools, so this is a list rather than a recommendation. Vendors and coverage around this shutdown have most often pointed at HiBob, Rippling, BambooHR, Factorial, Calamari, HR Partner and MHR.
Read all of it with the obvious caveat in mind: nearly every “Lattice is shutting down” guide currently ranking was published by a company selling a replacement. That does not make them wrong, and several are genuinely useful on export mechanics. It does mean the shortlist you are reading was assembled by someone on it.
The lesson worth taking
Lattice gave eight months of notice, which is not the failure here. The failure is that the data retention terms turned out to be worse than the standard policy customers assumed applied, and nobody discovers that until the shutdown notice lands.
Two things to check in every vendor contract you hold, while this is fresh:
- What is the post-termination data retention window, and does it apply to every product line? Lattice’s 180 days reportedly did not extend to HRIS customers. A retention promise in a master agreement can be undercut by a product-specific schedule.
- What export format are you entitled to, in writing? “You can export your data” and “you can export your data in a form another system can ingest” are very different commitments, and only one of them helps at 3am in week ten of a migration.
More on contract terms that survive this kind of event in Grandfathered SaaS Pricing Is Ending. The running list of retirements is in Legacy Plan Sunsets: Every SaaS Tier Being Retired in 2026.
Dates and export details here come from published third-party reporting, linked inline, and had not been confirmed against a Lattice notice at the time of writing. If you know differently, tell us and we will correct it and say what changed.