Microsoft Copilot Pricing in 2026: Plans, Free Tier & Cost

Microsoft Copilot starts free, and for most personal use that is the end of the story. If you want more, the consumer paid plans run from $9.99 a month, with Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 putting Copilot inside your Office apps. For work, the business plans run from $18 to $30 per user per month. As of June 2026, those are the headline numbers.

The catch is the one almost every guide skips: the business plans are an add-on. You cannot buy Microsoft 365 Copilot on its own. You must already hold a qualifying Microsoft 365 license first, so the real cost is often two to three times the sticker. Below is every current Microsoft Copilot price, reconciled and dated June 2026, plus the only question the numbers exist to answer: which plan, if any, you should actually pay for.

One disambiguation first, because the search results mix them: this is about Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant. It is not GitHub Copilot, the separate coding tool for developers, which is sold on its own plans and not covered here. Microsoft also prices Security Copilot, Sales and Service Copilot, and Copilot in Dynamics 365 separately; this guide covers the everyday assistant most people mean.

How Much Does Microsoft Copilot Cost? Every Plan at a Glance

Here is the whole family in one place, at US prices as of June 2026.

Two things drive the confusion. First, "Copilot" is not one product but a family: a free consumer chatbot, paid consumer plans, a free work chat tier, paid business licenses, and a platform for building agents (our guide to what Microsoft Copilot is sorts them out). Second, the business tiers are add-ons, which is where the budget surprises start.

Is Microsoft Copilot Free? What the Free Tier Actually Gives You

Yes, and there are two different free tiers, which trips people up.

The first is consumer free Copilot at copilot.microsoft.com and in the mobile apps. It gives you chat, web answers with clickable citations, image generation, and voice, with usage limits during busy periods. No subscription required.

The second is Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, the free tier for work. If your organization has an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, anyone signed in with a work account gets secure, web-grounded AI chat at no additional cost, with commercial data protection.

The catch is in what they cannot do. Both free tiers answer from the public web and from files you upload in the moment. Neither one reaches into your own emails, documents, or meetings on its own. The thing most people want from Copilot at work, summarizing a client thread or drafting a reply from your real inbox, only comes with a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If a colleague says Copilot summarized their inbox and yours will not, the difference is a paid license, not a setting.

There is also a trap for admins: the free Copilot Chat lets anyone build agents grounded in work data, but running them against your organization's data is metered in Copilot Credits, not included, so a free agent can quietly generate a bill once it answers from your SharePoint and Teams content.

For light personal use, the free Copilot is genuinely enough. You start paying for one of two very different things: Copilot inside your Office apps, or Copilot that reads your company's work.

Microsoft Copilot for Individuals: Personal, Family, and Premium

If you want Copilot working inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for personal use, it comes bundled into a consumer Microsoft 365 subscription. There is no separate consumer "Copilot" line item anymore.

Yearly billing saves up to 17 percent over monthly, and all three offer a one-month free trial. One quirk worth knowing: the Copilot AI features are tied to the subscription owner and cannot be shared across the household, even on Family and Premium.

If You're Looking for Copilot Pro

You cannot buy it anymore. Microsoft stopped selling the standalone Copilot Pro subscription (the old $20 a month consumer plan) to new customers on October 1, 2025, and folded its features into Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 a month. Existing Copilot Pro subscriptions keep working but stop renewing after August 1, 2026, and Microsoft's consumer pricing page now lists only Personal, Family, and Premium.

This matters because "Copilot Pro at $20 a month" is the single most common out-of-date Copilot price still floating around. Wikipedia, older pricing guides, and even Google's AI Overview keep repeating it. And to answer the question this retirement tends to raise: no, Microsoft Copilot is not shutting down. Microsoft is renaming and expanding the lineup, not ending it.

When Microsoft added Copilot to the standard Personal and Family plans, it raised those subscription prices, and not every customer wanted to pay for AI. For those who do not, a no-Copilot "Classic" version of Personal and Family still renews at the older, lower price, though as of 2026 it is not openly listed and usually surfaces only as a downgrade option during cancellation.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Business: The $18, $21, and $30 Plans

This is where the per-user pricing lives, and where most of the confusion starts. There are three things to know.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is the free work tier described above: secure web-grounded chat included with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription, plus agents billed on a metered basis. No per-user fee.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is the paid add-on for smaller organizations, up to 300 users. Microsoft currently lists it at $18 per user per month on an annual commitment, a promotional rate reduced from the $21 list price, or $25.20 per user per month month-to-month (the $18 rate needs the annual commitment). It adds Copilot inside Teams, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, grounded in your work data, plus the ability to build agents in Copilot Studio.

Microsoft 365 Copilot, the enterprise tier, is $30 per user per month, paid yearly. It is the full assistant for larger organizations, layered on an enterprise base license.

Which tier you can buy comes down to your base license, not a headcount Copilot checks. Copilot Business attaches to a Microsoft 365 Business plan, itself capped at 300 seats; the $30 Microsoft 365 Copilot attaches to enterprise E3 or E5, with no cap. So a small company on E5 can buy the $30 tier, while one over 300 users cannot use Copilot Business, in both cases because of the base plan. And the cheap headline assumes an annual commitment, so you cannot quietly trial a month at the advertised rate.

The Real Cost: Copilot Is an Add-On You Buy on Top of a License

This is where the sticker shock comes from. Microsoft 365 Copilot is never sold on its own. The $18, $21, or $30 buys you the Copilot layer only. To use it, every user must already hold a qualifying Microsoft 365 base license, and that base often costs more than the Copilot add-on itself. So your true monthly cost is the base plan plus Copilot.

If you do not have a base license, the add-on will not even appear as purchasable in your admin center, which is why the real per-seat cost lands well above the advertised number.

Microsoft also sells bundled "with Copilot" plans for small businesses that fold the base and the add-on into one number, like Business Standard with Copilot at $23.50 and Business Premium with Copilot at $32, which usually beats buying the pieces separately because Microsoft prices the bundle below the sum of the parts. At the top of the enterprise stack, the Microsoft 365 E7 plan at $99 per user per month is the one enterprise tier that bundles Copilot in rather than charging for it as an add-on.

Now multiply by your team. Ten seats of Copilot Business on Business Standard is not $180 a month, it is $305 a month all-in, or roughly $3,660 a year. At E3, ten enterprise seats run $660 a month. It scales fast, so blanket-licensing everyone on day one is the most expensive way to start.

The cheaper path is the one Microsoft's own ROI numbers depend on. Velosio's read of Microsoft's Forrester study cites a 4.5x three-year return and about 1.5 hours a week freed per person, but only when adoption happens. In practice that means licensing a small pilot cohort, proving the value, then scaling, rather than paying for seats that go cold by month three.

Copilot Studio and Cowork: The Pay-as-You-Go Credit Model

There is a third billing model, and it is the newest source of bill shock: consumption credits, where one Copilot Credit costs about a cent.

Copilot Studio, the low-code tool for building custom agents, is sold as a $200 per month capacity pack that includes 25,000 Copilot Credits, or pay-as-you-go at $0.01 per credit through an Azure subscription. The trap is that different actions burn wildly different amounts: a scripted answer might cost a single credit, while a token-heavy reasoning response can cost a hundred or more. The same agent can run $8 a month or several hundred depending on how it is built and how often it runs, and capacity-pack credits expire monthly if unused. We break the credit math down in our Copilot Studio guide.

Then there is Copilot Cowork, which became generally available on June 16, 2026 and caused the loudest pricing reaction of the year. Cowork is the agentic layer that takes a long, multi-step job and runs it in the background. Two things about its pricing surprised people. It is not a flat seat fee, and it is not included in the Microsoft 365 Copilot license you already pay for. Every Cowork run is billed on usage-based Copilot Credits, on top of a Copilot license, with the per-task cost depending on the model it uses (it runs on Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6, with OpenAI's GPT-5.5 available through Microsoft's Frontier early-access program), the context it pulls in, and how long it runs.

For most buyers, Studio and Cowork are not part of the decision at all. They matter only if you are building or running agents, and if you are, the rule is the same: set caps, estimate against a real task, and never assume a credit pack is a fixed cost.

What Changes on July 1, 2026, and Other Moving Targets

Copilot pricing has a few dates worth knowing, because the number you see today is not necessarily the number you pay at renewal.

The most important nuance: the July 1, 2026 price increase hits the base Microsoft 365 commercial licenses, not the Copilot add-on. Business Basic moves from $6 to $7, Business Standard from $12.50 to $14, E3 from $36 to $39, and E5 from $57 to $60. Business Premium holds at $22, and the Copilot add-on price itself does not rise. Because your all-in cost is base plus Copilot, a higher base still raises what you pay overall, so the base goes up, not Copilot.

The promotional rates have their own clocks. The enterprise volume discounts on the $30 add-on expire June 30, 2026, on a ladder of 15 percent off at 10 or more seats, 20 percent at 100, 30 percent at 300, and 40 percent at 1,000. The $18 Copilot Business rate and the bundled "with Copilot" discounts are also promotional: Microsoft's pricing pages list them as available through September 30, 2026, with the discount applying to the first year. Treat $18 as a limited-time rate, not a permanent price, since it can step toward the $21 list once the window closes.

Finally, every figure here is US list pricing. The 2026 changes apply globally with local market adjustments, so the actual cost in your currency, agreement type, and purchasing channel can differ, and nonprofit, education, and government (GCC) tenants have their own Copilot pricing. International and sector buyers should confirm against their own Microsoft pricing rather than converting the US number.

Is Microsoft Copilot Worth It? Copilot vs ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini on Price

On the consumer side, Copilot is priced in line with its rivals. Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 sits next to ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Gemini AI Pro, which all cluster around $20, except Premium also bundles the Office apps and 6 TB of storage. You are not paying $20 for a chatbot alone.

You do not pay the Copilot premium for a better general chatbot. For pure standalone chat, many people find ChatGPT a little sharper, and at $20 with no prerequisite license it is the simpler buy. What the $30 Microsoft 365 Copilot does that a $20 chatbot cannot is work grounded in your own tenant, summarizing your real meetings and drafting from your real inbox, and acting inside Word, Excel, and Outlook. That is a different category, not a more expensive version of the same thing. We go deeper in Microsoft Copilot vs ChatGPT, and our Gemini pricing breakdown runs the same exercise for Google.

So whether Copilot is worth it depends on the buyer: for someone who lives in Office, Premium at $19.99 is an easy yes; for a business, the real question is the all-in cost and whether the seats get used.

Which Microsoft Copilot Plan Should You Actually Pay For?

Most people overbuy. Here is how to decide, from the bottom up.

Stay free if you mostly ask Copilot general questions and want web answers. The free Copilot covers it, and you will know you have outgrown it the day you keep wishing it could read your own files.

Pay $19.99 for Microsoft 365 Premium if you want Copilot working inside your personal Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint, and you would value the Office apps and storage anyway. It is the cleanest consumer choice and it replaced Copilot Pro.

Pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot Business ($18 to $21 per user, plus a qualifying base plan) if a small team needs Copilot grounded in your shared work. There is no broad free trial for the paid add-on, so use the free Copilot Chat tier to evaluate, pilot a handful of seats month-to-month to confirm adoption, then switch to the annual rate once it proves out.

Pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise ($30 per user, plus E3 or E5) when a larger organization needs the full assistant with enterprise compliance. Budget the all-in cost and pilot before you scale.

Add Copilot Studio or Cowork only if you are building or running agents. Treat the credits as a metered utility, set spending caps, and estimate against a real workload before you commit.

It comes down to three habits: match the plan to the job, never blanket-license, and budget the base license alongside the add-on.

Why Copilot's Price Matters for Your Brand

One point outlasts any specific price. Copilot is not just a tool people work inside. When someone asks the free Copilot or Copilot Chat a question, it searches the web through Bing's index, reads pages, and answers by citing them with clickable footnotes. Those citations are real traffic and real authority, and they point to specific pages.

So the more useful question than which plan to buy is whether Copilot names your brand and cites your page when a customer asks it what to buy. That visibility does not come on a pricing tier. In our experience auditing brands across AI engines, most companies have no idea whether Copilot can even see them, let alone whether it cites them. The full method is in our guide to showing up in Microsoft Copilot.

Copilot's prices will move again, so confirm the current figure on Microsoft's pricing page before you pay. And once you know what Copilot costs, the next question is what it tells people about you. Our Citation Interceptor maps where Copilot and the other AI engines cite sources your brand is missing from, so you can see which conversations to join, and our guide to tracking AI visibility covers the broader approach.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Microsoft Copilot cost per month?

Microsoft Copilot is free to start. Paid consumer plans run from $9.99 a month, with Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 putting Copilot in your Office apps. For work, Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is $18 to $21 per user per month and Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise is $30 per user per month, both on top of a required Microsoft 365 base license, as of June 2026.

Is Microsoft Copilot free?

Yes. There is a free consumer Copilot for web chat, image generation, and voice, and a free Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat for work that comes with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription. Both answer from the public web and files you upload, but neither reads your own emails, files, or meetings on its own. That grounding only comes with the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

What's the difference between the $18 and the $30 Copilot?

The $18 to $21 plan is Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, for organizations up to 300 users. The $30 plan is Microsoft 365 Copilot, the enterprise tier with no seat cap, layered on E3 or E5 licenses. Both are add-ons that require a qualifying Microsoft 365 base plan underneath.

Do I need a Microsoft 365 subscription to use Copilot?

For the free consumer Copilot, no, just a Microsoft account. For the paid business plans, yes. Microsoft 365 Copilot is an add-on that requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 base license first, so the real cost is the base plan plus the Copilot add-on, from about $24 to $87 per user per month all-in (a bundled small-business plan is the cheapest path).

Is Copilot Pro discontinued?

For new customers, yes. Microsoft stopped selling the standalone Copilot Pro subscription on October 1, 2025 and folded its features into Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 a month; existing Copilot Pro subscriptions keep working but stop renewing after August 1, 2026. Guides and AI answers that still quote "Copilot Pro at $20" as the main consumer plan are out of date.

Is Microsoft Copilot worth it compared to ChatGPT Plus?

For a standalone chatbot, ChatGPT Plus at around $20 is cheaper and many find it sharper. You pay the Copilot premium for something different: an assistant grounded in your own company's email, files, and meetings that works inside Word, Excel, and Outlook. If you only want a general chatbot, a $20 rival is the simpler buy.

Sources

• Microsoft 365 Copilot plans and pricing (business and enterprise) - Microsoft
• Copilot pricing plans for individuals - Microsoft
• Meet Microsoft 365 Premium (Copilot Pro retirement) - Microsoft
• About Microsoft Copilot Pro (existing-subscriber wind-down) - Microsoft Support
• Copilot Cowork is now generally available - Microsoft
• Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing (Copilot Studio) - Microsoft
• Microsoft 365 enterprise plans and pricing (E3, E5, E7) - Microsoft
• Advancing Microsoft 365: new capabilities and pricing update (July 1, 2026) - Microsoft
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing Calculator 2026 - Velosio
• Claude plans and pricing - Anthropic
• Copilot Cowork pricing and usage details - IT Pro
• Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions - Gemini