What does Microsoft 365 Copilot really cost?

In shortWhat to expect from this document

Ask what Copilot costs and almost everyone names the same figure, and that figure is rarely right. It is an add-on to a subscription you already pay for, it now goes by three different names, and part of what organisations buy was already included at no charge. This article puts the licence types side by side with the prices Microsoft publishes for the Netherlands on 12 September 2026, then works out what comes on top.

The short version: the licence price is easy enough to find and it is printed on the website. What catches organisations out are the four items around it. The base licence that has to sit underneath, the annual term that becomes fixed after seven days, the agents that bill separately, and the clean-up work in your own environment that only becomes visible once Copilot starts searching. Those four are in section 05.

01Three things are called Copilot

The naming shifted during 2026, and that explains a good deal of the confusion in quotes. Microsoft now distinguishes three things you will meet as soon as you sign in with a work account.

Microsoft Copilot Chat

This is the chat experience included at no extra cost with almost every business Microsoft 365 or Office 365 subscription. It requires a Microsoft Entra account and a licence from the list Microsoft maintains: Business Basic, Standard and Premium, E3, E5 and E7, F1 and F3, the Teams subscriptions, and on the Office 365 side E1, E3, E5 and F3. Copilot Chat works with data from the web and with whatever the user puts into it.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

The paid add-on. It adds what Copilot Chat does not have: reasoning across your own organisational data through Microsoft Graph, Work IQ and the semantic index. That brings Copilot into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams with access to your email, calendar, chats, documents and sites, within the permissions the user already had.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Business

Since December 2025 there is a separate variant for organisations of up to 300 users. Microsoft describes it as the same features at a lower rate, tied to a Business subscription. Since 1 July 2026 Microsoft also sells two fixed combinations in which Copilot is part of the base subscription, and those are cheaper than the same components bought separately.

02The prices side by side

There are two price lists, depending on the size of your organisation. The line sits at 300 users: below it you buy from the Business range, above it from the Enterprise range.

Up to 300 users

The two combinations at the bottom deserve attention, because there is a difference there that is easy to miss. Business Standard on its own costs €12.13 and the Copilot add-on €15.60, which is €27.73 together. The same two as a fixed combination cost €20.36. That is €7.37 per user per month for exactly the same thing. At 25 people it comes to €2,211 a year. Once the promotion on the separate add-on ends, the gap widens to €9.97.

From 300 users

It pays to do the arithmetic here too. E5 with the Copilot add-on comes to €84.13. Microsoft 365 E7 costs €91.92 and contains those same two plus Agent 365 and the Entra Suite. For €7.79 per user per month more you therefore get two additional products. Whether that is worth it depends on whether you want those products; it is certainly not an obvious premium.

03What you already have without paying

Before you buy licences, it is worth knowing where the free version stops. That point is nearer than many people think, and at the same time further than the price list suggests.

Two rows in that table need explaining. The first is Outlook. There, Copilot Chat answers questions about your mailbox, calendar, meetings and chats even without a paid licence, along with a bounded set of related files. That is more than most organisations realise, and for anyone whose main problem is email it is a reason to measure first how far that gets you.

The second is priority. Copilot Chat runs on what Microsoft calls standard access: it depends on available capacity and can vary through the day. If capacity runs short the user is notified and work in progress is not interrupted. For occasional use that is fine. For someone who leans on it all day it is an irritation, and what you are really buying is certainty.

There is also a middle ground that is rarely mentioned. Users without the add-on still have a limited set of Copilot features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, again on standard access. Drafting in Word, formulas and analysis in Excel, building a deck in PowerPoint, writing an email in Outlook, summarising a meeting in Teams. Anyone who wants to find out whether Copilot does anything for the organisation can start there without spending a euro. Our Copilot Chat training is built around exactly that. What else is and is not in the free variant is set out feature by feature in Copilot Chat: what do you get free, and what not?

04Why €26 is never €26

The same footnote appears on every Microsoft Copilot price page: a separate licence for a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan is required. Copilot is an add-on, not a standalone product. That means the real price per employee is always the sum of two lines.

For an organisation already on Microsoft 365, the second column is of course not the new spend. You are paying the base licence anyway. But the comparison is a fair one if you are weighing Copilot against an AI tool from another supplier: then the whole chain belongs in the sum, including the subscription you keep because Copilot runs on it.

05Four items that never appear on the quote

The term is fixed after seven days

An annual subscription at Microsoft is not a soft arrangement. You can cancel within seven calendar days of purchase or renewal, with a pro-rated refund. After that, cancellation is no longer available and the full term is invoiced, even if nobody is using the licence any more. The same window applies to reducing the number of licences. Buying a year ahead for 25 people on E3 with Copilot commits €19,134 on the basis of an estimate that can no longer be adjusted on day eight.

Paying monthly costs more

For the enterprise add-on the difference is modest: €26.00 paid yearly against €27.30 paid monthly, and in both cases you are committed for a year. For the Business variant the gap is wider. There, €15.60 on an annual subscription sits against €21.84 on a monthly one. That monthly subscription genuinely can be cancelled month by month, so you are buying flexibility, but the premium is over forty per cent.

Agents bill separately

Copilot licences give access to agents and the right to build them. What those agents consume is billed on top, in Copilot Credits. A capacity pack of 25,000 credits per month costs €173.30 in the Netherlands. Organisations that prefer to pay per use connect an Azure subscription and are billed $0.01 per credit.

How many credits an agent consumes depends on how it is built: a straightforward answer costs less than an answer that first searches your documents and then performs an action. Microsoft provides an estimator to work that out in advance, and administrators see consumption per agent, per user and per policy in the admin centre. Set that spending cap straight away. What an agent costs tends to become clear only once it is in use, and by then it is too late to influence the first invoice. Anyone going down this route is better off learning how those agents are put together first, which is what our Copilot Studio training covers.

The clean-up work in your own environment

This is the item most often skipped and the one that takes the most time. Copilot searches within the permissions an employee already has. That sounds reassuring, until you realise that in most organisations those permissions grew over years with nobody looking at them. A SharePoint site once opened up to the whole organisation "for convenience", a shared folder with performance reviews, an old project site with salary data in it. Nobody found any of it, because nobody was looking. Copilot does look.

A Copilot licence gives your SharePoint administrators access to SharePoint Advanced Management to map this and deal with it. Some of the capabilities, such as restricting who may create sites, do require the separate SharePoint Advanced Management Plan 1 add-on. None of this appears on the licence invoice. It sits in the hours: someone has to read those reports and act on them, before the first user starts searching.

06Two sums over a year

Twenty-five employees, twelve months, excluding VAT, using the prices above.

An organisation of 25 on Business Standard

• Base subscription, which you were already paying: €12.13 × 25 × 12 = €3,639
• The fixed combination with Copilot Business: €20.36 × 25 × 12 = €6,108
• So the extra cost of Copilot is €2,469 a year, roughly €99 per employee

An organisation of 25 on E3

• Base subscription, which you were already paying: €37.78 × 25 × 12 = €11,334
• Adding the Copilot add-on: €26.00 × 25 × 12 = €7,800
• Together €19,134 a year, of which €7,800 is new

The difference between those two figures is striking: the same functionality costs about a third in the Business range of what it costs in the Enterprise range. That is deliberate; Microsoft created the Business variant in December 2025 for precisely this reason. If you sit just above the 300-user line it is annoying, and it is worth working out with your partner what is possible in your case.

07The largest cost is not on the invoice

Of all the figures in this article, the licence is the smallest. An hour of work by a Dutch employee cost an employer an average of €48 in 2025, according to Statistics Netherlands. The Copilot add-on costs €26.00 a month. It pays for itself the moment someone saves a little over half an hour a month with it.

In practice it is not that simple, for a reason that has nothing to do with the licence. Most rollouts hand licences to everyone on a single day, schedule an hour of explanation and then let go. The usage that follows is lopsided: a handful of people get something out of it daily, and the rest stop clicking the icon after the first week. Meanwhile the licence is billed for all of them.

That pattern is well documented and quite avoidable, though not with a price list. It takes practice on real work, and someone who is reachable at the moment an answer turns out to be wrong. That is what our Microsoft 365 Copilot training is for: participants work with their own documents, emails and meetings. If the broader question at your organisation is how to approach the rollout, then framework adoption is the subject. And anyone who would rather read up first on what Copilot does in practice will find it in the complete guide to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Cowork.

In closingA sober conclusion

For an organisation of up to 300 users, Copilot is now cheap enough that it is no longer the most exciting line in the budget. In that case take the fixed combination rather than the separate add-on, because that saves €7.37 per user per month for nothing in return.

For larger organisations the sum is more serious, and there the important decision is not which licence but for how many people. Start small enough to be able to correct course. The seven-day window punishes an over-generous first order more heavily than any difference in rate.

If you have several tools running side by side, the price question is only half the story anyway. The overview of our AI and Copilot training goes into choosing between them, and for the comparison with a supplier outside Microsoft, what does Claude cost gives the same breakdown for Anthropic.

SourcesVerified on 12 September 2026

• microsoft.com – Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise, the $30.00 and $31.50 rates, taken on 12 September 2026
• microsoft.com – Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dutch price page, the €26.00 and €27.30 rates
• microsoft.com – Microsoft 365 Copilot for business, Dutch price page, rates for Copilot Business and the fixed combinations
• microsoft.com – Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans and pricing, rates for E3, E5 and E7
• microsoft.com – Microsoft 365 for business plans and pricing, rates for Business Basic, Standard and Premium
• microsoft.com – Microsoft Copilot Studio, the €173.30 capacity pack of 25,000 Copilot Credits
• learn.microsoft.com – License options for Microsoft Copilot, which base subscriptions qualify
• learn.microsoft.com – Overview of Microsoft Copilot Chat, the difference between Copilot Chat and the paid licence, and the organisational grounding in Outlook
• learn.microsoft.com – Minimum requirements for Microsoft Copilot Chat, which licences are eligible
• learn.microsoft.com – Partner announcements, July 2026, the fixed combinations from 1 July 2026 and the promotion extended through 31 December 2026
• learn.microsoft.com – Partner announcements, November 2025, the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot Business and the 300-user limit
• learn.microsoft.com – Cancellation policy for the new commerce experience, the seven-day window
• learn.microsoft.com – Cancel your subscription, pro-rated refund within seven days, and turning off recurring billing after that
• learn.microsoft.com – Meters for Microsoft Copilot pay-as-you-go services, the $0.01 per credit rate
• learn.microsoft.com – Prerequisites for SharePoint Advanced Management, what a Copilot licence unlocks and what needs the separate add-on
• Statistics Netherlands – The labour market in figures 2025, labour costs averaging €48 per hour worked in 2025