Journal · Engineering
Your Microsoft 365 bill went up on July 1
Microsoft raised Microsoft 365 business prices on July 1, 2026, but you keep your old rate until renewal. Business Standard went from $12.50 to $14 per user; Business Premium did not move.
A dental practice in Noblesville pays for eleven Microsoft 365 seats. On July 1 the price of each seat went up a dollar fifty. Their office manager will not see the difference until March.
Microsoft raised list prices across most of its Microsoft 365 business plans on July 1, 2026, and existing subscribers keep the old rate until the subscription renews. If you pay yearly, your increase is sitting on a future date you have probably never looked at.
Two numbers are worth pulling up this week: your renewal date, and the exact plan you are on. One of the three small-business plans did not go up at all.
What changed on July 1
| Plan (with Teams) | Before | Now | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Basic | $6.00 | $7.00 | +16% |
| Business Standard | $12.50 | $14.00 | +12% |
| Business Premium | $22.00 | $22.00 | none |
| Apps for business | $8.25 | $10.00 | +21% |
Prices are per user, per month, on annual billing.
Business Standard is the plan most shops I work with are on: desktop Office apps, business email, and a terabyte of OneDrive per person. That one went up 12 percent. Apps for business, the cheap tier that gets you Word and Excel and not much else, took the biggest hit at 21 percent.
Business Premium held at $22, which changes the math further down.
Why did Microsoft raise the price?
Copilot. Microsoft folded its baseline AI chat into the base plans instead of selling it as an add-on, then spread the cost across the list price.
The increase buys you Copilot Chat: a chat window with web access, writing help, data analysis, and, as of the June-to-August 2026 rollout, awareness of your inbox and calendar. That is Microsoft's free AI tier, now inside the base price.
Copilot working on your own files inside Word, Excel, and Outlook is still the paid product.
I want to be straight about this. If you were never going to open an AI assistant, you are now paying about $18 a year per seat for one. That is the deal Microsoft made on your behalf.
When do I start paying the new price?
At your next renewal on or after July 1, 2026. Microsoft honors your current rate for the rest of your current term.
For an annual subscriber who renewed in February, the new rate lands next February. A shop that renewed in June has about ten months. Anyone paying month to month is already on the new price.
To find your date, sign in at admin.microsoft.com, open Billing, then Your products. The renewal date sits next to each subscription. Put it on the calendar. That is the day the new number shows up, and the last useful day to change plans before it does.
The Business Premium gap just narrowed
Business Premium stayed at $22 while Standard went to $14. The distance between them dropped from $9.50 to $8.00 per user per month.
Premium adds Intune for device management, Defender for Business, and Entra ID P1 for conditional access. For a dental office or a law practice holding records that would ruin somebody's month if a laptop walked out of the building, $8 a seat is the cheapest remote-wipe you will find.
That is not an argument for upgrading. The number you turned down two years ago is a different number now, and if you have been running Standard plus a separate antivirus subscription, the arithmetic may have flipped.
The three dollars nobody checks
Microsoft sells a version of each plan without Teams. Business Standard without Teams runs $10.79 instead of $14.00.
That is $3.21 per user per month. For the eleven-seat dental practice, $423.72 a year.
The tradeoff is real: you lose Teams. If your staff coordinates on group texts and a whiteboard by the sterilization room, you have been paying for Teams anyway. If your front desk lives in Teams chat all day, keep it and skip this section.
Billing frequency is the other lever. Business Standard without Teams costs $10.79 on annual billing and $12.95 month to month. Paying monthly costs you about 20 percent, which is the price of being able to cancel in any given month.
Is the Copilot bundle worth $9.50 a seat?
Microsoft made two bundles permanent on July 1: Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50, and Business Premium with Copilot at $32.00.
Standard with Copilot is $9.50 above plain Standard. Across eleven seats, $1,254 a year.
My read, after watching a few offices try it: the value shows up for people who live in Excel and Outlook all day, and it does not show up for people who open Word twice a week. An office manager reconciling insurance claims against a spreadsheet gets real hours back. A hygienist does not.
Do not buy it for the whole office. Microsoft lets you mix plans inside one tenant. Put two or three people on the Copilot bundle, leave the rest on Standard, and look again in ninety days. Two seats costs $228 a year instead of $1,254.
The default with software pricing is to buy the tier for the person who needs it most, then pay for it for everybody.
What to do this week
- Sign in to admin.microsoft.com, go to Billing, then Your products, and write down your renewal date and your exact plan name.
- Count your paid seats. Then count the people who still work there. Offices carry departed employees on the license bill for months.
- Decide about Teams before your renewal date, not after.
- If you want Copilot, buy two seats and watch what happens, rather than eleven.
The seat count is where I find the most money. A salon in Westfield I looked at this spring was paying for nine seats and employed six people. At the new price, that is $504 a year for three mailboxes nobody opens.
None of this is urgent, which is the reason it will not get done. Microsoft does not mail you a warning letter. The new rate arrives on a renewal invoice that looks like the last eleven, somebody in the office pays it, and the year moves on. Set a calendar alert two weeks before your renewal date. Then you get to make the decision instead of discovering it.
Sources
| # | Source | What it backed up |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Microsoft 365 Business plans and pricing | Current list prices, including Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot at $32.00. |
| 2 | Microsoft 365 Business plans without Teams | Without-Teams pricing ($10.79 Business Standard) and the annual vs monthly billing difference. |
| 3 | Realigning global licensing for Microsoft 365 | Microsoft offering business suites with and without Teams to new customers. |
| 4 | Act now: lock in current pricing on Microsoft 365 Copilot business bundles | Microsoft's own notice on the Copilot business bundles and pre-increase pricing. |
| 5 | Microsoft 365 Business price increase 2026 | Before-and-after prices for Business Basic, Standard, and Premium, and the Copilot Chat bundling. |