Microsoft Copilot Pricing in 2026: Every Plan and What You Really Pay

Microsoft Copilot pricing starts at nothing and tops out at $30 per user per month, and almost everyone quoting you a number is quoting the wrong one. The free consumer assistant costs nothing at all. Copilot inside Word and Excel needs a Microsoft 365 subscription from $9.99 a month. At work, the full Copilot licence is $18 to $30 per user per month, but it is an add-on, which means it sits on top of a Microsoft 365 plan you are already paying for. The advertised price and the invoice are two different numbers, and the gap between them is usually larger than the Copilot licence itself.

This guide lays out every tier with figures taken directly from Microsoft’s own pricing pages, checked on 23 August 2026. It covers what the free tier actually stops doing, what a $9.99 subscription buys you in hard usage limits, the real per-seat cost once the base licence is included, and everything that moved this year. It also untangles something no other pricing guide gets right. The $18 small-business rate is promotional, and it carries two different expiry dates. Which one applies to you depends on whether you buy from Microsoft directly or through a partner. If you already know the product line-up, skip ahead. If you do not, our companion guide to what Microsoft Copilot actually is sorts out which version you have first.

The Key Takeaways

• The full range: free for the consumer assistant, $9.99 to $19.99 a month for personal plans, $18 to $30 per user per month for work licences.
• The add-on trap: business Copilot requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan underneath it. A realistic all-in seat costs $32 on Business Standard and $69 on E3.
• A deadline that costs money, twice: Copilot Business is $18 per user per month until 30 September 2026 buying direct, but Microsoft has extended the same rate through 31 December 2026 in the partner channel. List price is $21.
• What $9.99 really buys: 60 AI credits a month, Vision capped at 10 minutes a day, Voice at 30 minutes a day, and 25 agent tasks a month. On Family plans, only the owner gets any of it.
• Copilot did not get more expensive in July. Microsoft 365 base plans rose on 1 July 2026, but Microsoft states the increase “does not apply to standalone Microsoft Teams or Copilot SKUs”.

Microsoft Copilot Pricing in 2026: Every Plan at a Glance

Microsoft sells Copilot through three separate storefronts that rarely reference each other: a consumer page, a small-business page and an enterprise page. That fragmentation is the single biggest reason people cannot get a straight answer about cost. Below is every tier in one table, with prices as listed by Microsoft on 23 August 2026.

Two rows in that table do the most damage to budgets. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business and Microsoft Copilot (enterprise) both say “base licence needed”, and that is not a footnote. It doubles or triples the real figure, which is what the next sections work through.

What Microsoft Copilot Costs for Personal Use

Personal pricing is the simpler half, but it is also where Microsoft is least forthcoming about what your money buys. Every consumer plan advertises “Copilot”, yet the three tiers grant meaningfully different amounts of it.

The Free Tier Is Real, and It Has a Hard Edge

Microsoft Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com costs nothing, works with any Microsoft account, and handles chat, web search and image generation. This is not a trial. It is a permanent free product, and it is useful enough that plenty of people never need anything else.

The edge is sharp, though. Free Copilot cannot open your documents, cannot read your mail, and does not appear inside the desktop Office apps. The moment you want Copilot to draft in Word from a file on your drive or summarise an Outlook thread, you are into a paid Microsoft 365 plan. That is the entire free-to-paid boundary, and it is worth understanding before you pay for anything.

What $9.99 a Month Actually Buys You

This is the question almost no pricing guide answers, and Microsoft does publish the numbers. On Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, subscribers get 60 AI credits per month. Credits are consumed across Designer, Create, Photos, Paint, Notepad, Word and Excel, so a few afternoons of image generation will clear the monthly allowance on its own.

The per-feature caps matter just as much. Microsoft’s own support documentation lists Vision at 10 minutes per day, Voice at 30 minutes per day, and agents at 25 tasks per month shared amongst all agents. On Microsoft 365 Premium those rise to 15 minutes of Vision, 60 minutes of Voice, and what Microsoft describes as extensive usage in place of a fixed credit count.

There is one restriction that catches households out. On a Family plan, Microsoft states plainly that “AI benefits are only available to the subscription owner and cannot be shared with others”. You can share the $12.99 plan with five people. You cannot share the Copilot in it. If two people in the house both want AI features, the Family plan does not solve that, and the honest comparison at that point is against standalone assistants rather than another Microsoft tier.

What Happened to Copilot Pro

Copilot Pro, the standalone consumer subscription, is gone. Microsoft’s support page states that “Copilot Pro is no longer available for purchase; existing subscribers can continue using it until they cancel or support ends on August 1, 2026”. That date has now passed. Microsoft points former subscribers at Microsoft 365 Premium as the replacement, which folds the advanced consumer Copilot features into a $19.99 plan that also includes the Office apps and storage.

If you are reading a pricing guide that still lists Copilot Pro as something you can buy, that guide is out of date, and you should treat its other figures with the same suspicion. Our roundup of which AI Pro tiers you can still test for free covers what replaced it across the market.

Microsoft Copilot Pricing for Business and Enterprise

Work pricing splits by company size, and the split is not cosmetic. Small businesses and enterprises buy different products at different prices with different eligibility rules.

Copilot Chat, the Free Business Tier Nobody Mentions

Before paying for anything, check whether you already have Microsoft Copilot Chat. It is available at no extra cost to eligible Microsoft 365 account holders, it works across Teams, Outlook and the web, and it can reason over files you upload to it. What it cannot do is reach into your organisation’s mail, files and meetings on its own. That grounding is the thing the paid licence buys, and for a lot of teams the free tier covers more ground than they expect.

The $18 Small-Business Rate

Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is the small-business add-on, aimed at organisations up to 300 users. Microsoft’s pricing page currently lists it at $18.00 per user per month paid yearly, reduced from a list price of $21.00, or $25.20 on a monthly commitment. It requires an existing qualifying Microsoft 365 Business plan underneath it.

Microsoft also sells two bundles that fold the licence in and remove the arithmetic: Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot at $32.00 per user per month on annual billing. If your organisation is in Europe and buying a no-Teams SKU, both are cheaper, at $20.30 and $28.80 respectively.

The $30 Enterprise Licence

Larger organisations buy the enterprise add-on at $30.00 per user per month paid yearly, or $31.50 on monthly billing with an annual commitment. Microsoft requires “a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription” underneath it, which in practice means E3, E5, Business Standard or Business Premium. The $30 figure has not moved since launch, and it did not move in July when the base suites did.

What You Really Pay Per Seat

Here is the arithmetic that the advertised prices leave out. Every row below adds the Copilot licence to the base plan Microsoft requires beneath it, using current annual-commitment list prices.

Two conclusions fall straight out of that table. First, the bundles beat the add-on at both small-business tiers, by $8.50 a seat on Standard and $8.00 on Premium. If you are buying Copilot for a team on Business Standard, buying the bundle rather than adding the licence saves over $100 per person per year for the same product. Second, an E5 seat with Copilot is $1,080 per user per year, which is the number that should be in a business case, not $30.

What Changed in 2026

Copilot pricing moved more this year than in the two before it, and most published guides capture only part of it. Here is the sequence.

The rename in that table is worth a moment. Microsoft’s documentation now states that “Microsoft 365 Copilot is now named Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is now named Microsoft Copilot Chat”. No price moved with it. What did change is that the paid work licence and the free consumer assistant now share a name, which is why so much pricing advice about Copilot confuses the two before it reaches a number.

Did Microsoft Copilot Get More Expensive in July?

No, and this is worth being precise about because it is widely misreported. Microsoft 365 base plans did rise on 1 July 2026. Copilot did not. Microsoft’s own licensing update FAQ states that the announced update “does not apply to standalone Microsoft Teams or Copilot SKUs”.

The practical effect is still a bigger bill, because the base plan under your Copilot licence went up even though the licence itself held. If your Copilot seat costs more than it did in June, that is where the increase came from. For a view across vendors rather than just Microsoft, our complete AI pricing comparison tracks the same question for every major assistant.

When the $18 Rate Actually Expires

If you are buying Copilot for a small business, this is the most consequential section in this article, and it is the one that every other pricing guide gets half right. The $18 rate has two different end dates, and which one applies to you depends on where you buy.

Buying Direct From Microsoft: 30 September 2026

Microsoft’s public pricing page states that the discount is “available between July 1, 2026, and September 30, 2026”. It requires an annual commitment and applies to the first year. If you are buying through microsoft.com with a credit card, this is your deadline.

Buying Through a Partner: 31 December 2026

The partner channel tells a different story. Microsoft’s Partner Center announcements describe it as an extended promo. Copilot Business “remains available as a standalone offering at 18 USD per user per month after 15% promo, now extended through December 31, 2026”. There is no user minimum between 1 and 300 seats, on an annual subscription with annual billing.

The same announcement adds a second offer that direct buyers never see. A Microsoft 365 Business Basic with Copilot Business bundle costs $21 per user per month after a 25% discount, also running to the end of December. For a small team that does not need the desktop Office apps, that is the cheapest route to a full Copilot licence anywhere in Microsoft’s catalogue.

What This Means for Your Decision

The gap is $3 per user per month, or $36 per user per year. On a 40-seat team that is $1,440 in the first year. If you are buying direct and September is tight, talking to a Microsoft partner buys you three more months at the same price, and possibly a cheaper bundle on top. That is worth knowing in September. It also explains why published pricing guides disagree: both dates are real, and they apply to different buyers.

Is Microsoft Copilot Worth the Money?

It depends entirely on which problem you are solving, and the honest answer splits in two.

If you need an assistant that reads your organisation’s actual mail, files, chats and meetings, Copilot is the only product that does it natively inside Microsoft 365, and no third-party tool replicates that grounding. At $69 an all-in E3 seat, the case rests on whether that organisational context saves more than an hour of work per person per month. For many knowledge teams it does. If you are weighing that seat against a standalone assistant, we put the two side by side in Microsoft Copilot versus ChatGPT.

If what you actually want is a strong general assistant for writing, research and images, the calculation is different. You are looking at $9.99 a month for 60 credits and 10 minutes of Vision a day, tied to one vendor’s models. At the same price, a free-tier chatbot comparison or a multi-model app that lets you pick between providers per task will usually give you more range for the money. Fello AI takes that second approach, running multiple frontier models in one Mac app for $9.99 a month, which is the same figure Microsoft charges for the entry consumer plan.

The buying advice is simple. Check whether Copilot Chat already covers you before paying anything. If you are a small business, buy the bundle rather than the add-on, and check whether a partner can hold the $18 rate for you past September. Once you have decided, our guide to how to use Microsoft Copilot properly covers getting value out of the licence. Students should check whether they qualify for free Microsoft and GitHub Copilot access before paying at all.

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