Pokemon Bank Shuts Down for Good in February 2027

The Last 3DS Light Goes Out

For years, Pokemon Bank outlasted almost everything Nintendo built for the 3DS. It survived the eShop closure in 2023. It kept running after Nintendo shut down the console’s broader online services in 2024. While one piece of 3DS infrastructure after another went dark, Bank just kept quietly doing its job, moving monsters from old cartridges to new ones, generation after generation.

That streak ends on February 26, 2027.

The Pokemon Company confirmed that Pokemon Bank will stop functioning at noon Japan time that day, which works out to the evening of February 25 for players in the US. The function that moves Pokemon from Bank into Pokemon HOME shuts off at exactly the same moment. If your collection is still sitting in Bank when that clock hits zero, it stays there permanently.

What You Need to Do Before February 2027

The math here is pretty simple but pretty unforgiving. Any Pokemon parked in Bank needs to be sent to HOME before the deadline. Once the service goes offline, there is no appeal process, no grace period, and no way to reverse the outcome.

New downloads of the app stopped some time ago, so anyone who still has it installed and active is in better shape than someone who wiped their 3DS clean. One other detail worth flagging: PokeMile Points accumulated in a Bank account will not carry over to HOME. As reported by Dexerto, the whole transition is designed to be completely final. There is nothing left to redeem, nothing left to roll over.

Bank went free in 2023 when the eShop shuttered, which gave players a longer runway than they might have expected. The extra years were genuinely useful for anyone who needed time to work through a sprawling collection spread across multiple games and cartridges. But the runway has a clear end now, and February is not as far away as it might feel.

Meanwhile, HOME Keeps Growing

While Bank prepares for its final months, Pokemon HOME is adding new connections rather than cutting them. Starting in October, HOME will link with the Switch versions of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, the Kanto remakes that arrived on Switch earlier this year. Trainers who complete the Pokedex in those games will receive a Celebi, according to the announcement.

The contrast is a little bittersweet. One end of the pipeline is closing while the other end keeps expanding. That is probably how it has to work, and The Pokemon Company has clearly tried to give players as much time as possible to make the move. Bank going free before the eShop closed, then continuing to operate through the 3DS online shutdown, represented meaningful extensions of a service that could have ended much earlier.

Still, for anyone with Pokemon Red or Gold cartridges that fed into Bank years ago, the February deadline is the last chapter of a very long chain. Some of those monsters have traveled through half a dozen games and two decades of hardware. Getting them across the finish line into HOME before next February is the only way to keep that chain intact.