Microsoft 365 : The new prices apply to your next renewal
Effective July 1, 2026, Microsoft has implemented new pricing for most of its software suites Microsoft 365 and Office 365. The increase ranges from 5% to 33% depending on the plan, and two plans remain unchanged. Nothing will change on your bill as long as your subscription is active: the new prices will apply at your next renewal, and that’s when you’ll suddenly see the difference over the course of twelve months.
What is increasing, and by how much?
The prices published by Microsoft are in U.S. dollars, per user per month. The amounts billed in Switzerland depend on the rate charged by your reseller and the currency of the contract, but the relative differences are the same.
| Map | Before | After | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | 6.00 | 7.00 | +16 % |
| Microsoft 365 Business Standard | 12.50 | 14.00 | +12 % |
| Microsoft 365 Business Premium | 22.00 | 22.00 | unchanged |
| Office 365 E1 | 10.00 | 10.00 | unchanged |
| Office 365 E3 | 23.00 | 26.00 | +13 % |
| Office 365 E5 | 38.00 | 41.00 | +8 % |
| Microsoft 365 E3 | 36.00 | 39.00 | +8 % |
| Microsoft 365 E5 | 57.00 | 60.00 | +5 % |
| Microsoft 365 F1 | 2.25 | 3.00 | +33 % |
| Microsoft 365 F3 | 8.00 | 10.00 | +25 % |
Two things stand out. The most expensive plans show the smallest percentage increase: 5% for Microsoft 365 E5 versus 16% on Business Basic. And the plans for field staff are increasing the most: one-third on F1, one-quarter on F3.
Who Really Pays for the Increase?
The math rarely works out the way you’d expect. A company with 80 employees using Business Standard sees its annual bill increase by just over $1,400. The same company with 300 production workstations running F1 sees its bill rise by $2,700—for licenses that used to cost next to nothing.
Consequently, it is organizations with a high proportion of field staff—in manufacturing, retail, healthcare, hospitality, and logistics—that are experiencing the greatest variation, even though they are often the ones that are least compliant with their Microsoft licenses, precisely because the per-unit cost was negligible.
Note: The price of * Business Premium * has not changed. As a result, the price gap with *Business Standard* has automatically narrowed, and the trade-off between the two is no longer the same as it was a year ago.
Three Questions to Ask Before Signing
When is your next renewal due? That’s the only date that matters. A current subscription remains at the agreed-upon rate until it expires: Microsoft explicitly states this for multi-year agreements. So you don’t have an immediate cash flow problem; you have a deadline to prepare for.
How many licenses are you actually paying for that aren’t being used? That’s the question that yields the biggest returns, and it has nothing to do with the price increase: in most license inventories we review, a portion of the licenses is assigned to accounts of former employees, terminated contractors, or functional accounts that don’t need them. A 12% increase on an oversized license pool of 10% costs more than the increase itself.
Does the assigned plan match the actual usage? An employee who never opens documents and only checks their messages on a shared computer has different needs than an office worker. This is precisely the distinction between basic plans and comprehensive plans, and it’s the only form of optimization that stands the test of time—far more so than negotiating a discount.
What Microsoft is offering in response
Microsoft attributes the price increase to the features added to the suites over the past several years, specifically citing three areas: artificial intelligence capabilities, including Copilot Chat; security, including Microsoft Defender for Office Plan 1; and fleet management with Intune Suite.
This is verifiable, and it’s also something to keep in mind: if these features are included in your plan and no one has activated them, you’re already paying for them. Taking stock of the features that are included but not deployed is often more cost-effective than renegotiating, and it depends on no one but you.
What to Do Now
- Make a note of the exact expiration date of your primary subscription, as well as those of your secondary subscriptions—they don't always end on the same date.
- Retrieve the list of assigned licenses and compare it to the list of active employees.
- Identify the populations that might be covered by a field plan rather than a comprehensive plan, and vice versa.
- List what is included in your current plans but has not been deployed.
- Calculate the difference over a 12-month period using the new rates before the sales discussion, not during it.
This inventory does not require any special tools, but it does take time and requires a collaborative effort between human resources and IT. Lambert Consulting can assist you with this process when your equipment is spread across multiple sites or contracts, and no one has a complete overview.
Two useful points of context for this discussion: Business plans received an additional 50 GB of email storage as part of the same packaging changes, and several features— Microsoft 365 , and Entra ID —will change by April 2027; these changes are unrelated to pricing but will affect the same customer base.
Microsoft Sources
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