Microsoft Copilot Pricing (2026): Every Plan, Copilot Credits and a Worked Example for 150 Users

TL;DR

• Microsoft Copilot for work costs $30 per user per month paid yearly for enterprise customers, and $21 per user per month paid yearly as the Copilot Business add-on for Microsoft 365 Business plans, with an $18 first-year price for existing customers until 31 December 2026.
• Copilot Chat is included at no additional cost with eligible Microsoft 365 plans. It answers from the web and files you upload, not from your company's mail, files and meetings.
• Agents built in Copilot Studio are billed in Copilot Credits. Use by employees who hold a Copilot licence is included within fair use. Everyone else costs credits, at 2 credits per generative answer and 10 more when the agent grounds on your Microsoft Graph.
• For a 150-person company, licensing everyone costs $4,500 a month. Licensing 40 people and giving the other 110 a grounded agent costs about $2,400 a month in our worked example below.

All prices below were checked on Microsoft's pricing pages on 2 November 2026 and are US list prices.

Microsoft Copilot plans and prices

Sources: Copilot business plans and Copilot for enterprise.

Copilot Chat: included

Microsoft says Copilot Chat is "available at no additional cost" for Microsoft Entra users with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription. It includes answers grounded in current web information, file uploads with limits, Copilot Pages and IT controls. Agents inside Copilot Chat use metered pricing.

What it does not do is read your mailbox, your SharePoint files or your Teams meetings on its own. That is what the paid licence adds.

Copilot Business: $21, or $18 for the first year

Copilot Business is the add-on for companies on Microsoft 365 Business plans. It lists at $21 per user per month paid yearly, or $25.20 paid monthly. Between 1 July and 31 December 2026, existing customers with an eligible Business plan can buy it at $18 for the first year on an annual commitment. Microsoft 365 Business plans are for organisations of up to 300 users.

If you are buying the suite and Copilot together, Microsoft sells two bundles: Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot at $32, both per user per month paid yearly.

Copilot for enterprise: $30

The enterprise add-on is $30 per user per month paid yearly, or $31.50 paid monthly on an annual commitment. It needs a separate qualifying Microsoft 365 licence. Microsoft lists the same price for new and existing customers.

Usage-based features

Each business plan now notes "usage-based billing for select advanced AI features". Microsoft names Copilot Cowork, Code, Autopilot and the Work IQ APIs as usage-billed, and does not list their rates on the plan pages. Budget for them separately if you plan to use them.

Copilot Credits: what agents cost

Agents you build in Copilot Studio are metered in Copilot Credits. Microsoft's billing rates, from its Copilot Studio billing documentation:

Three rules decide most bills:

1. Licensed employees are free within fair use. When a person with a Copilot licence uses an internal agent under their own identity, the activity is included.

2. Unlicensed employees and customers are not. A question from someone without a licence that grounds on your Graph and returns a generative answer costs 12 credits.

3. Autonomous agents always pay. An agent triggered by an event rather than a licensed person consumes credits even if everyone in the company is licensed.

When we checked Microsoft's Copilot Studio pricing page on 26 October 2026, prepaid capacity was $200 a month for a pack of 25,000 credits, with pay-as-you-go billing through Azure as the alternative. If a tenant on prepaid capacity reaches 125% of what it bought, Microsoft blocks its agents until capacity is added. Our guide to Microsoft Copilot agents covers Agent Builder and Copilot Studio in more depth.

Worked example: 150 people

A 150-person company on Microsoft 365 wants every employee to be able to ask questions about company information.

Option 1: license everyone. 150 x $30 = $4,500 a month, or $54,000 a year. Internal agents cost nothing extra within fair use.

Option 2: license 40, give 110 an agent. 40 x $30 = $1,200 a month in licences. The other 110 people use a Graph-grounded agent, five questions a day each, on 22 working days. Each question costs 12 credits, so 110 x 5 x 12 x 22 = 145,200 credits a month. That needs six 25,000-credit packs, 150,000 credits, at $1,200 a month. Total: $2,400 a month, or $28,800 a year.

Option 2 is cheaper, but the 110 people get an agent, not Copilot in Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. If usage doubles to ten questions a day, credits roughly double too, and the saving narrows.

What the price does not include

Copilot answers from Microsoft Graph: your mail, files, calendar and Teams, plus external data you sync into Graph through connectors. It only shows a person what they already have at least view permission for, and Microsoft states that prompts, responses and Graph data are not used to train foundation models.

That makes Copilot a strong assistant inside Microsoft 365. It also sets its limits:

• It finds documents, it does not resolve them. If three files give three different launch dates, Copilot can summarise all three. It does not know which one is current.
• It forgets what happens outside the suite. Decisions made in Slack, Salesforce, Jira or a customer's email thread reach Copilot only if someone builds the connector and the data is shaped to fit.
• Each assistant builds its own context. Companies that run ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini beside Copilot end up with several separate pictures of the company.

Where Sentra fits

Sentra is organization memory: one governed record of what is true in the company, built from email, chat, meetings, documents and systems of record across more than 200 tools. Every fact carries when it became true and when it stopped, so a changed decision replaces the old one instead of sitting beside it.

Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and internal agents read the same memory over MCP and REST, and every answer respects each source's permissions. Sentra also acts first: it notices when a commitment slips or two teams disagree, and tells the person who should act, with a named person approving before anything is sent. It is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, and runs in the cloud, in an isolated VPC or air-gapped on-prem.

In the Glass Company, an independent test built and scored by Era by Eon, Sentra had never seen the company and found 495 of the 497 problems hidden in it, in 102 minutes. Claude Opus, given the same systems, found 8%.

Copilot compared with other assistants

See our ChatGPT Enterprise pricing breakdown, the Gemini Enterprise guide and our comparison of ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude and Gemini.

Frequently Asked Questions