Microsoft has confirmed that it will add private message reminders to its Teams collaboration platform in September 2026. The long-awaited feature will let users create, update, complete, and delete reminders directly from any chat or channel message, and it will be available on all major clients—Windows, Mac, web, iOS, and Android.
The feature was revealed through a recent update to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, officially titled “Message Reminders in Teams.” While the exact release date within September hasn’t been specified, the roadmap entry confirms that the rollout will happen across all endpoints simultaneously, ensuring a consistent experience no matter how you access Teams.
What the New Message Reminders Will Do
For years, one of the most frustrating omissions in Teams has been the inability to set a simple reminder on a message. Whether a colleague asks you to review a document by Friday or a manager drops an important link in a channel, you’ve had to rely on your memory or external tools to follow up. That’s about to change.
Here’s what we know from the roadmap description: once the feature is live, you’ll be able to interact with any message—either in a one-on-one or group chat, or in a channel conversation—and set a reminder for yourself. The interaction will likely be via a right-click context menu on desktop (or a long-press on mobile), with an option like “Remind me about this.” You’ll then choose a date and time for the reminder; presumably, you’ll also be able to set a custom note, though the roadmap does not explicitly mention that.
When the designated time arrives, Teams will send you a notification. Tapping or clicking it will take you back to the original message, and you’ll have the option to mark the reminder as complete or delete it. The whole process is private: no one else in the chat or channel will know you’ve set a reminder, making it a purely personal productivity tool.
The roadmap confirms that users will be able to create, update, mark as complete, and delete reminders—full lifecycle management directly from the message. That means you won’t need to navigate away to a separate app or pane to manage your reminders; it’s all contextual.
Why This Matters for Your Daily Workflow
The impact of this feature will be felt differently depending on how you use Teams:
For everyday users and small teams:
If you’re working in fast-paced chat environments, it’s easy to miss messages that require later action. With reminders, you can instantly flag a message and trust that Teams will prompt you at the right time. This is especially handy for tasks like “Reply to this vendor inquiry tomorrow morning” or “Check back on this status update next week.” It cuts down on the mental load of keeping track of open loops.
For team leads and project managers:
Action items often get lost in long channel threads. Although you can still use the Tasks or Planner apps to assign tasks, a private reminder lets you personally track follow-ups without cluttering the shared workspace. For example, you can set a reminder to review a design file after the team has had a chance to comment, without creating a formal task.
For IT administrators:
This feature shouldn’t require any tenant-level configuration; it will appear once Microsoft rolls it out. That said, admins may want to update internal training materials and inform users about the new capability. Importantly, because the feature is personal (reminders are not visible to others), it won’t add noise to channels or chats—no need to worry about a flood of system messages. If Microsoft eventually adds admin controls (like the ability to disable reminders), those will likely appear in the Teams messaging policies, but for now, there’s no indication that’s planned.
For developers and power users:
If your team has built custom bots or workflows to handle message-based reminders—using Power Automate, for example—this native feature may reduce the need for such workarounds. However, more complex reminder logic (like recurring reminders or trigger-based alerts) may still require automation. The native feature is designed for simple, one-off, private reminders.
The Long Road to Reminders
Message reminders are hardly a novel concept. Slack has offered a similar feature for nearly a decade; users can click the “…” menu on any message and set a reminder for a specific time, or use natural language shortcuts like “/remind me about this tomorrow at 9am.” Even Skype, Microsoft’s predecessor in the consumer space, allowed you to set reminders on messages years ago. In the enterprise collaboration market, the lack of such a basic utility in Teams has been a persistent pain point.
If you scour the Microsoft Feedback portal, you’ll find thousands of upvotes for “Add a remind me later feature” dating back to at least 2018. Users have come up with creative workarounds: the most common was using the third-party “Remind” bot in Teams, which lets you @mention the bot with a command like “@Remind remind me about this tomorrow at 8am.” Others used the “Tasks by Planner and To Do” app to manually create a task from a message, but that required several clicks and pulling up a separate interface. The built-in “Save this message” feature was a half-step—you could bookmark a message, but you wouldn’t get a notification.
Microsoft’s own roadmap tool first showed a “Message reminders” feature in late 2024 or early 2025, with an original target of late 2025, but was later pushed to September 2026. This delay underscores the complexity of implementing a feature that works seamlessly across all Teams clients and respects the privacy model. Now that it’s locked in for September, the wait is nearly over.
How to Get Ready for September 2026
For most users, there’s nothing you need to do. The feature will arrive as a server-side update, meaning it doesn’t depend on you installing a specific monthly update (though it’s always a good idea to keep your Teams client up to date). Here’s what you can expect and how to prepare:
- No manual activation required: Once Microsoft flips the switch, the option to set a reminder will appear in your context menus. There won’t be a toggle in Settings; it’s just there.
- Check your release track: If you’re part of an organization that uses the Teams Public Preview or Targeted Release programs, you might see the feature a few weeks ahead of general availability. Keep an eye on your app version: when the feature appears, it may be noted in What’s New.
- Update your personal workflow: Start thinking about how you’ll integrate reminders into your daily routine. Since it’s a private tool, you can use it for anything from following up on unresolved questions to remembering to read an article someone shared. It pairs well with the existing “Save message” and “Tasks” features—you might save messages for reference and set reminders for action.
- For admins: No action is required, but you can proactively prepare a communication to your users closer to the launch date. You might also want to review any existing third-party reminder bot usage and consider phasing them out to reduce fragmentation.
- Stay flexible: Roadmap dates can shift—though September 2026 is the current target, check the Microsoft 365 Roadmap periodically for updates or any last-minute changes. If the release gets delayed, you can continue using workarounds like the “Remind” bot.
What’s Next for Teams Productivity
The addition of message reminders is part of a broader refresh of the Teams experience that Microsoft has been working on. Over the past year, the company has improved the channel experience, added new Copilot AI features, and made performance enhancements. Reminders fill a basic gap, but they also open the door to deeper integration.
In the future, we might see reminders that sync with Microsoft To Do or Outlook tasks, so that a reminder set on a Teams message appears in your task list automatically. Natural language processing—similar to what Slack offers—could let you type something like “Remind me about this next Monday” in the compose box and have Teams parse the intent. Recurring reminders are another common request: imagine setting a weekly reminder on a channel message that updates your team on a standing agenda.
For now, though, the September 2026 arrival of simple, private, native message reminders is a win for every Teams user. It’s a feature that should have been there from the start, but as the saying goes, better late than never.