Microsoft 365 Business Pricing 2026: Plans, the July Rise and Copilot

Microsoft 365 Business costs $7 per user a month for Basic, $14 for Standard and $22 for Premium in 2026, billed yearly. Basic and Standard went up on 1 July 2026 (from $6 and $12.50), while Premium held its price. Adding Copilot through Microsoft's bundles brings Standard to $23.50 and Premium to $32 per user a month, which is cheaper than buying the Copilot Business add-on on top.

That last detail is the one most budget spreadsheets get wrong. Microsoft sells Copilot to small businesses two ways, and the bundle wins by a wide margin at every team size, so a buyer who prices Copilot as a line item on top of the existing plan overstates the bill. For a 25-person company the gap is over $2,500 a year, as the cost table below shows.

Prices were read on 28 October 2026 on Microsoft's business plan comparison, the product pages for Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, Standard with Copilot and Apps for business, and the Copilot pricing page. The before and after figures for July come from Microsoft's own licensing announcement. Toolradar data: Microsoft 365 drew 86 compare-page visits in the 30 days to October 2026, ranking third of the 47 email tools with 20 or more such visits, and visitors most often weigh it against Google Workspace and Google Drive (Microsoft 365 on Toolradar).

Microsoft 365 Business plans at a glance

Prices as of Oct 2026, read on Microsoft's US pages, per user per month, before tax.

Plan	Paid yearly	Paid monthly	Office apps	Copilot
Business Basic	$7.00	$8.40	Web and mobile only	Copilot Chat only
Business Standard	$14.00	$16.80	Desktop, web and mobile	Copilot Chat only
Business Premium	$22.00	$26.40	Desktop, web and mobile	Copilot Chat only
Business Standard with Copilot	$23.50	$28.20	Desktop, web and mobile	Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams
Business Premium with Copilot	$32.00	$38.40	Desktop, web and mobile	Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams
Apps for business	$10.00	$12.00	Desktop and web, no Teams or business email	Not included
Copilot Business add-on	$18.00 promo ($21.00 list)	$25.20	Needs an eligible Business plan	Full Copilot

Monthly billing costs exactly 20% more on every plan. Every plan is capped at 300 users, includes 1 TB of OneDrive storage per user, and auto-renews. Microsoft also sells versions without Teams: Basic at $5.40, Standard at $10.79 and Premium at $18.79 per user a month paid yearly, aimed at companies that run a different meeting tool.

What changed on 1 July 2026

Microsoft raised its business suites on 1 July 2026 and announced the move the previous December. Its licensing page gives the old and new US list prices side by side.

Plan	Before 1 July 2026	From 1 July 2026	Change
Business Basic	$6.00	$7.00	+16% (Microsoft's figure)
Business Standard	$12.50	$14.00	+12% (Microsoft's figure)
Business Premium	$22.00	$22.00	No change
Apps for business	$8.25	$10.00	+21% (Microsoft's figure)
Business Basic (no Teams)	$4.40	$5.40	+23% (Microsoft's figure)
Business Standard (no Teams)	$9.29	$10.79	+16% (Microsoft's figure)

Existing customers keep their old price until their renewal date, according to the same announcement. A company that renewed in May 2026 pays the old rate until May 2027, so the rise lands on different months for different tenants. Check the renewal date in the admin center before you budget next year.

Microsoft paired the rise with feature additions it says roll out over the summer: 50 GB more email storage on all three Business plans, URL time-of-click protection on Basic and Standard, and Copilot Chat enhancements (inbox and calendar awareness, plus Word, Excel and PowerPoint agents). Standalone Copilot and Teams products were excluded from the increase. The cheapest plan rose fastest in percentage terms, which matters for companies that put most staff on Basic and keep desktop Office for a few.

What each plan actually buys

Business Basic is email, Teams and browser Office. You get Exchange mail on your own domain with a 100 GB mailbox, Teams meetings, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the browser and on phones, but no desktop apps. Staff who build complex spreadsheets or long Word documents will feel that within a week; frontline and field staff who mostly read mail usually will not.

Business Standard adds the desktop apps. Each user can install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote on up to five PCs or Macs, five tablets and five phones. It adds webinar hosting with registration, Microsoft Loop workspaces and Clipchamp video editing. For most office teams this is the plan the rest of the page should be compared against.

Business Premium is Standard plus security. It adds Intune device management, Defender for Business against ransomware and malware, Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, Entra ID access controls, Purview data loss protection and a 1.5 TB email archive per user. Microsoft sells Defender for Business alone at $3 per user a month, so Premium is mostly worth it when you would otherwise buy device management and endpoint protection separately.

Apps for business is desktop Office without the rest. It covers Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook on desktop and web plus 1 TB of storage, but no Teams and no business email. It suits a company that already runs mail elsewhere. If you only need a document editor occasionally, our guide to getting Microsoft Office for free lists the legitimate routes that cost nothing.

How Copilot is priced for small businesses

Every Business plan includes Copilot Chat, which answers questions from the web and helps with writing. The full Copilot, which reads your mail, files and meetings and works inside the Office apps, costs extra and comes two ways.

Bundle: Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot at $32 per user a month on yearly billing. Against the plain plans, that is $9.50 a user a month more for Standard and $10 more for Premium (our arithmetic from Microsoft's list prices).

Add-on: the Copilot Business add-on at $18 per user a month, discounted from $21 for purchases between 1 July and 31 December 2026. The promotion requires a yearly commitment and applies to the first year only, so the renewal goes back to list unless Microsoft extends it. It is sold only to existing customers with an eligible Business plan.

The add-on loses on price. Pairing Business Standard with the add-on costs more per seat than the Standard bundle at either add-on rate, promotional or list, and you still pay for two products instead of one. The add-on makes sense in one case: you want Copilot for a handful of people on a plan you are not changing, such as a few analysts on a Premium tenant where everyone else stays without it.

Two more costs sit outside the per-seat price. Microsoft says some advanced AI features, including Copilot Cowork and Autopilot, use usage-based billing on top of the license, which an admin caps in Cost Management. Agents built in Copilot Chat on Basic are metered too. For the per-user Copilot math at ten seats and the enterprise add-on, see our Microsoft 365 Copilot cost breakdown.

Techpresso readers get a short daily brief on the software small businesses pay for, including price rises like this July round. The signup is at the end of this page.

What 25 users pay in a year, before and after July

Our cost model: a 25-person company on a single plan, using Microsoft's printed per-user prices. Totals are our arithmetic (25 users x monthly price x 12), before tax and before any usage-based AI charges.

Plan for all 25 users	Yearly billing, old price	Yearly billing, from July 2026	Monthly billing for 12 months, from July 2026
Business Basic	$1,800	$2,100	$2,520
Business Standard	$3,750	$4,200	$5,040
Business Premium	$6,600	$6,600	$7,920
Business Standard with Copilot	n/a	$7,050	$8,460
Business Premium with Copilot	n/a	$9,600	$11,520
Business Standard + Copilot add-on at $18	n/a	$9,600	n/a
Business Premium + Copilot add-on at $18	n/a	$12,000	n/a

The July rise adds $300 a year for 25 Basic users and $450 for 25 Standard users. That is real money but small next to the Copilot decision. Moving the same team from Standard to Standard with Copilot adds $2,850 a year; buying Copilot as an add-on instead adds $5,400, nearly twice as much.

The bundle saves $2,550 a year at 25 users on Standard and $2,400 on Premium, compared with the add-on at its promotional price. Once the add-on returns to its list price after the first year, the Standard gap widens to $3,450 (our arithmetic: 25 x $11.50 x 12).

Monthly billing is a $1,410 premium for 25 Standard with Copilot users. Pay monthly only if headcount is genuinely uncertain. Microsoft gives a seven-day window after a paid subscription starts to cancel for a prorated refund, and says cancelling deletes the associated data, so plan the exit before you sign rather than after.

Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace on price

At list price the two suites now cost the same. Google charges $7, $14 and $22 per user a month for Business Starter, Standard and Plus on its Annual plan, and $8.40, $16.80 and $26.40 on its month-to-month Flexible plan, per Google's payment plan comparison, read on 28 October 2026. That is the same ladder as Microsoft's three plans, cent for cent.

The difference is what each price includes. Google's Standard plan puts Gemini inside Docs, Sheets, Gmail and Meet and gives 2 TB of pooled storage per user, per the Workspace pricing page. Microsoft's Standard at the same price gives desktop Office and 1 TB per user, but its in-app AI costs the Copilot bundle on top. For 25 users on yearly billing, Google Workspace Standard comes to $4,200 a year (our arithmetic: 25 x $168), against $7,050 for Microsoft 365 Standard with Copilot.

Google also advertises introductory discounts for new customers, limited to the first 20 users for 12 months, so a first-year Workspace quote can come in lower than its list price. Our Google Workspace pricing page has the full ladder, and Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365 covers the choice beyond price: Excel depth, Windows management and migration cost. Toolradar keeps a profile of Google Workspace too.

Hidden costs to budget for

• Copilot usage charges. Cowork, Autopilot and metered agents bill on usage beyond the license; set a spending policy in the admin center first.
• Teams Phone. Calling to regular phone numbers needs Teams Phone Standard at $10 per user a month paid yearly. Our business phone system pricing page compares it with dedicated phone providers.
• Storage beyond 1 TB. Microsoft sells extra storage as prepaid capacity or pay-as-you-go, without a list price on the comparison page.
• The 300-user ceiling. At 301 users you move to Enterprise plans, priced differently.
• The add-on renewal. The $18 Copilot rate is first-year only; budget year two at $21.

Which plan should a small business buy?

Business Standard is the default for an office team in 2026. At that price it gives desktop Office, Teams, business email and 1 TB per person, and it costs the same as Google's comparable plan. If you buy more than one plan, staff who only read mail and join meetings fit Basic.

Choose Premium if you manage company laptops. Intune and Defender replace a separate device management and antivirus subscription, and Premium's price did not rise in July. Choose a Copilot bundle only for people who will use it daily; for a 25-person team, putting everyone on Standard with Copilot costs $2,850 a year more than plain Standard.

Avoid the Copilot add-on unless you need Copilot for a few people on a plan you are keeping. Avoid monthly billing for a stable team. If chat is the deciding factor, our Slack vs Microsoft Teams comparison prices both, and the best cloud storage for business ranking and Dropbox pricing page cover storage outside OneDrive. Teams securing shared logins should also read the best password managers for teams. To see which other SaaS vendors raised prices this year, check our SaaS pricing changes tracker, and Toolradar's Microsoft Copilot profile collects user reviews of the AI side.

How we checked these prices

We read Microsoft's business plan comparison, the Basic, Standard, Premium, Standard with Copilot and Apps for business product pages and the Copilot pricing page on 28 October 2026, on yearly and monthly billing, together with the footnotes on promotions, trials and cancellation. Old and new list prices come from Microsoft's licensing announcement for the July 2026 update. Google Workspace prices come from Google's help center and pricing page the same day. The cost table applies printed per-user prices to a fixed 25-person team, without taxes, promotions other than the one labelled, or usage-based charges. We did not run a Microsoft 365 tenant for this page.

FAQ

How much does Microsoft 365 Business cost per user in 2026?

On yearly billing, Business Basic costs $7, Business Standard $14 and Business Premium $22 per user a month. Monthly billing costs 20% more: $8.40, $16.80 and $26.40. The Copilot bundles cost $23.50 for Standard and $32 for Premium on yearly billing.

Did Microsoft 365 Business prices go up in 2026?

Yes, on 1 July 2026. Business Basic rose from $6 to $7 and Business Standard from $12.50 to $14 per user a month on yearly billing, while Business Premium kept its price. Existing customers keep the old price until their renewal date, per Microsoft's licensing announcement.

Is Copilot included in Microsoft 365 Business plans?

Only Copilot Chat, the web-grounded assistant, is included in every Business plan. Copilot inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams needs a Copilot bundle (Business Standard with Copilot or Business Premium with Copilot) or the Copilot Business add-on, which is $18 a user a month on a first-year promotion and $21 at list.

Is the Copilot bundle cheaper than the add-on?

Yes. Business Standard with Copilot costs $23.50 per user a month, while Business Standard plus the add-on costs $32 at the promotional rate. For 25 users on yearly billing that is a $2,550 yearly difference, our arithmetic from Microsoft's printed prices.

How much does Microsoft 365 cost for 25 employees?

On yearly billing, 25 users cost $2,100 a year on Business Basic, $4,200 on Business Standard and $6,600 on Business Premium. With Copilot bundled, Standard comes to $7,050 and Premium to $9,600 a year. These totals are 25 x the per-user monthly price x 12, before tax.

Is Microsoft 365 Business cheaper than Google Workspace?

They cost the same at list price: both vendors charge identical per-user rates for their three business tiers on yearly plans, from Basic or Starter up to Premium or Plus. Google includes Gemini in its Standard plan at that price, while Microsoft's in-app Copilot requires the bundle, so a team that wants AI everywhere pays less on Google.

Cite this: Techpresso, "Microsoft 365 Business Pricing 2026: Plans, the July Rise and Copilot", November 2026.

Want the next Microsoft, Google or Slack price change before it hits your renewal? Subscribe to Techpresso, the daily tech brief that tracks what small businesses pay for software.

Some offers on this page may be paid placements or contain affiliate links.