Microsoft 365 Copilot Business: usage-based billing is now on by default

Microsoft is changing how Copilot Business is billed. New licences now include pay-as-you-go Copilot Credits, switched on by default.

Key dates

• 19 October 2026: new purchases made directly from Microsoft
• 1 December 2026: new purchases through CSP partners (moved from 2 November)

What this means

Each new licence has a default spending limit of 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month. At the reported rate of $0.01 per credit, that is up to about $40 per user per month on top of the licence fee.

For a 50-user organisation, that is up to $2,000 per month in additional charges, depending on usage.

“Auto-apply new services” is on by default, so new metered features Microsoft adds later fall under the same spending policy.

Ireland is not on the list of markets excluded from the initial rollout.

What is included and what uses credits

Included in the licence:

• Copilot in Excel: building formulas, analysing a table, creating a chart
• Copilot in Outlook: summarising an email thread, drafting a reply
• Copilot in Teams: meeting recaps and action items
• Copilot in Word and PowerPoint: drafting a document, creating a deck from a file

Uses Copilot Credits:

• Copilot Cowork: multi-step tasks such as a weekly pipeline review, meeting preparation across email and files, or a first-draft RFP response
• Work IQ APIs: custom applications that use Microsoft 365 data and context
• GitHub Copilot Harness: agent-based development tasks
• Copilot Studio agents and other long-running agentic features

The credits a task uses depend on the model, how long it runs, how much content it retrieves and the actions it takes. The same request can cost different amounts on different days.

What organisations should do now

• Review the default spending limit and set it to fit your budget.
• Turn off “Auto-apply new services” if new features need approval before they are billed.
• Limit credit-based services to specific user groups.
• Set usage alerts and assign someone in finance to review them.
• Make sure your CSP partner can show you usage and charges by service and by user.

Where dataintelligence fits

AI costs are shifting from fixed licences to usage-based billing across Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud and Databricks. dataintelligence gives organisations and their managed service providers one view of usage and cost across all of these platforms, so charges can be tracked, allocated and reconciled before the invoice arrives.

If you want to understand what Copilot usage-based billing could cost your organisation, contact us.