You no longer need to work for a Workday customer or partner to build a Workday Extend app. On October 13, 2026, Workday announced that "anyone can now create a personal developer account on developer.workday.com" and set up a personal Workday development environment, which Workday describes as currently in Beta. A personal account gets one Development tenant to build in. This guide covers how to create the account, request the tenant, keep it from expiring, and build and test a first app.

Create a personal Workday developer account

  1. Open developer.workday.com and choose Create Account.
  2. The button takes you to Workday's Digital ID sign-up page. Create the account there.
  3. Sign in to the Workday Developer Site with that account.

Workday's documentation calls these Personal Account developers, joining through the Open Developer Platform (ODP) program. Company accounts that belong to a Workday Extend customer are a separate kind of account; the differences have their own guide.

Request your Development tenant

Workday documents these steps for Personal Account developers:

  1. In the Console section of the Developer Site menu, select Tenants.
  2. Under Development Tenants, click + to create a new tenant.
  3. Workday opens a page where you request the tenant. It emails you when the tenant is ready, usually within 15 minutes. Workday does not notify you inside the Developer Site, so watch your inbox.
  4. The email holds the tenant's sign-in details. Workday's instructions say to sign in as the user lmcneil and change the password within 72 hours.

Once the tenant is ready, the Developer Site lists its tenant alias, a login link, its status, its tenant type and who created it. From the same page you can reset the tenant's password or delete the tenant.

The limits Workday documents for personal tenants

Limit What Workday documents
Tenants One active Development tenant at a time
Creating tenants No more than two Development tenants within six hours
Expiry The tenant expires if you don't sign in to it for 7 consecutive days
Data Staged sample data; Workday recommends sample data only, and never personal data (PII)
Updates Workday's Weekly Service Update applies, and tenants are unavailable during maintenance
Deleting a tenant Irreversible: its data and configuration are deleted permanently
A replacement tenant Reuses the deleted tenant's URL

The expiry is the limit that catches people. If you only build on weekends, sign in to the tenant at least once during the week, and treat anything that exists only in the tenant as temporary.

Build your first Extend app

Workday's Extend documentation covers these tools:

  • App Builder, Workday's tool on the Developer Site for building an app's components.
  • App Preview, which shows a page and lets you interact with it without deploying. Workday documents that it supports only the UTC time zone, the en-US language and the en_US locale. A page that calls an endpoint needs either a connection to a tenant or mock data. When it is connected, the app makes its real calls, which can change data in the tenant.
  • The Workday Developer CLI, whose app:preview command opens the same preview.
  • Developer Agent, which Workday made generally available on October 13, 2026 as part of Workday Extend AI, for building from a plain-language description.

When you upload an app's source, App Hub compiles it into a build. From Console > Apps, the app's Promotions tab deploys it to your Development tenant. Workday's lifecycle documentation describes Development as the level where you "update and deploy your code continuously" while you build.

Test the app as the people who will use it

An app usually behaves differently for an employee, a manager and an HR partner. Workday documents proxy access for Development tenants:

  1. Run the Create Proxy Access Policy task.
  2. Set Restricted to Environment to the WCPDEV environment.
  3. In Groups That Can Proxy, choose the security groups whose members may act as someone else. Only unconstrained security groups can be chosen.
  4. In On Behalf Of, choose the groups whose members can be acted for.
  5. Use the Start Proxy and Stop Proxy tasks. While a proxy session runs, the tenant shows On Behalf of and the person's name.

The multi-persona testing guide covers what to check at each step.

Where a personal account's lifecycle stops

Workday Extend apps move through four promotion levels: Development, Implementation, Sandbox and Production. Each level after Development installs the app on a Workday customer's Implementation, Sandbox or Production tenant, which belong to that customer's company account. The tenant Workday documents for a personal account is a Development tenant, so in a personal account an app is built, deployed and tested in Development.

Using an AI agent with your developer account

kiweely is a desktop app that works with personal Workday developer accounts. You connect the account with your Workday Digital ID, and kiweely designs the app, has Workday validate every version, deploys it to your Development tenant once you approve, and tests it as each person with Start Proxy in a browser you can watch. It runs on your own ChatGPT or Claude plan or an OpenRouter key, and Kiweely Personal is free.

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