Copilot Licensing · 9 min read
Copilot Credits Explained: What Each Microsoft Workload Costs in September 2026
By James Wilkinson 11 September 2026
Copilot Credits in one page, from Microsoft's September 2026 guide. How to buy them, what Cowork, Copilot Studio, apps, Work IQ and Dynamics draw, and what the licence covers.
TL;DR
- A Copilot Credit is Microsoft's single usage currency for AI work that is not covered by a per user licence. Credits pool at tenant level and are spent by Copilot Cowork, Copilot Studio agents, workflows and apps, Work IQ APIs, Dynamics 365 agents and AI features in the Power Platform.
- Two ways to buy. Pay as you go at $0.01 a credit, billed in arrears with no commitment. Or the annual Pre-Purchase Plan, paid up front, discounted 5 per cent at 300,000 credits rising to 20 per cent at 300 million, with unused credits expiring at the end of the year.
- The Microsoft Copilot licence still covers Copilot Chat, Copilot in Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams, Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator, Work IQ grounding and the model choice. Credits start where multi-step, agentic work starts.
- Planning bands from the guide: a Cowork task 100 to 700 credits; a Copilot Studio agent run on the GitHub Copilot harness 100 to 500; building an agent 1 to 60 or more; running an app 10 to 5,000 a month depending on size; a Work IQ tool call 0.1.
- This page tracks Microsoft's own change log. The September 2026 edition added apps in Cowork and Copilot Studio. August added the three Copilot Studio harnesses and the rebrand from Microsoft 365 Copilot to Microsoft Copilot. I will update the page when the next edition lands.
I will be honest about why this page exists. I spend a fair part of every week reading Microsoft licensing documents so that the firms I work with do not have to, and in 2026 the pricing has moved faster than I can comfortably track. Cowork went to consumption billing in June. Copilot Studio gained a new harness with its own meter in August. Apps arrived in September. Each change came with a revised Copilot Credits Guide, and each revision moved a number I had quoted the month before.
So this is my attempt at one page that says what a Copilot Credit is, how you buy one and what each Microsoft workload draws, taken from the September 2026 edition of Microsoft’s guide. It replaces the scattered figures in my earlier posts as the place I will keep current. If it is out of date within a week, I will update it within a week. Microsoft publishes a change log at the back of the guide and I will mirror it at the bottom of this page. If the pace of change has your firm waiting for it to settle, I have set out whether waiting is the right call.
What a Copilot Credit is
Microsoft’s per user Copilot licence is a flat fee for predictable work: chat, drafting in Word, summaries in Outlook, meeting recaps in Teams. Agentic work is not predictable. A task that plans, calls tools, reads twenty documents and produces three outputs costs Microsoft a great deal more to run than a one line summary, and a flat licence cannot price it.
The Copilot Credit is the answer. It is a single usage currency, pooled at the tenant level, that every consumption billed AI workload in the Microsoft stack draws from. The number of credits a task consumes depends on its complexity, and the organisation pays the sum of what was consumed across all of them. One pool, one bill, one set of controls.
The workloads that draw from the pool today are Copilot Cowork, agents, workflows and apps built in Copilot Studio, apps built in Cowork, Work IQ APIs, agents in Dynamics 365 and AI features in Power Apps and Power Automate.
What the licence still covers
This is the part that gets lost in the noise, so I will put it before the rate card. Microsoft states in the guide that it remains committed to the per user subscription, and lists what it includes:
- Copilot Chat in Microsoft 365, the main place people ask, create and analyse.
- Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and Teams.
- The built in Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator agents.
- Work IQ grounding across email, calendar, files, people and organisational context.
- Access to more than one model, matched to the task.
None of that draws credits. Nor do agents on the standard harness or the Copilot Chat harness when they run in Microsoft channels, within fair use. For organisations up to 300 users the licence is Copilot Business, $21 per user per month on an annual plan at September 2026 list, about £16. The enterprise add-on for E3 and E5 is $30, about £23. Either way it is still where most of a firm’s Copilot value sits. Credits start where multi-step, autonomous work starts.
How you buy credits
There are two purchase constructs in the guide, plus a third in the Copilot Studio licensing guide it points to.
Pay as you go. The Microsoft Copilot Studio pay as you go meter counts credits consumed in a month and bills them in arrears at $0.01 a credit. No commitment, no cap unless you set one. It is provisioned in the Power Platform admin centre against an Azure subscription. This is the right starting point for almost everyone, because it produces the usage data you need before committing to anything.
The Pre-Purchase Plan. A one year pool of credits paid up front and bought in the Azure portal. Usage is deducted from the pool, overage falls back to pay as you go or a further purchase, and unused credits expire at the end of the term. The discount rises with the tier.
| Tier | Credits committed | Discount |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 300,000 | 5% |
| 2 | 1,500,000 | 6% |
| 3 | 3,000,000 | 7% |
| 4 | 15,000,000 | 8% |
| 5 | 30,000,000 | 10% |
| 6 | 75,000,000 | 12% |
| 7 | 150,000,000 | 14% |
| 8 | 225,000,000 | 17% |
| 9 | 300,000,000 | 20% |
Tier 1 is 300,000 credits, about £2,250 a year at the metered rate before the discount. For a firm running one or two agents that is a plausible annual figure. For a firm running Cowork across twenty people it may be a month. Both constructs count against a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment if you hold one.
The Copilot Studio licence, or Copilot Credit Pack. Covered in the separate Copilot Studio licensing guide rather than this one: a monthly subscription that includes a block of credits, which I covered in the Cowork costs post. It only pays off once monthly usage is consistently near the block.
You can buy through a partner on the CSP programme, through Microsoft Sales or directly online. Prices through a reseller are set by the reseller.
Where you control spend
Everything is managed in the Microsoft 365 admin centre: monitoring spend and usage, spending policies, usage thresholds and allocation of credits across the organisation. Microsoft calls this the FinOps layer, which is a grand name for the settings that stop a pilot becoming an invoice. Set them before the first share link goes out, not after. For the person who became the firm’s admin by default, the short version of this page is three numbers to check before your first agent goes live.
Microsoft also publishes two estimators. One covers Cowork and the GitHub Copilot harness. The other covers Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 agents. Both are informational and neither guarantees a bill, but they are the right way to build a budget before you have real usage.
The rate card, workload by workload
Every figure below is a Microsoft planning band from the September 2026 guide. Microsoft labels them rough estimates that vary with the work. Treat them as the scale of the thing, not a quote.
Copilot Cowork
Cowork bills per task, and what a task costs depends on four buckets: the model it chose, the runtime that keeps it working, the context it retrieved and the tools it called. The effort selector lets a person lean on the first of those.
| Task type | Shape | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Light | A few sources, light reasoning, one short output | 100 to 300 |
| Medium | Many sources, structured reasoning, two or more outputs | 300 to 700 |
| Heavy | Broad aggregation over long time frames, many outputs | more than 700 |
Prerequisites: a Microsoft Copilot licence, Cowork enabled, usage-based billing enabled and Anthropic models enabled in the tenant.
Apps built in Cowork and Copilot Studio
New in September. Cowork’s version is in the Frontier programme, Copilot Studio’s is a paid public preview. Building an app draws credits while the model generates and iterates. Running it on Microsoft’s managed host draws credits with the volume and complexity of what it does. I covered the licensing detail in the apps post; the bands are:
| App profile | Build, per app | Run, per app per month |
|---|---|---|
| Light: personal or team app, a handful of users | 250 to 450 | 10 to 50 |
| Medium: departmental, multiple connectors | 400 to 750 | 300 to 500 |
| Heavy: business unit wide, heavy connector traffic | 700 to 1,350 or more | 3,000 to 5,000 |
Users licensed with Power Apps Premium have app usage included instead, within that licence’s 40,000 Power Platform requests a day. AI inside the app, meaning agents and Work IQ APIs, draws credits regardless.
Copilot Studio agents and workflows
Copilot Studio now has three harnesses, and the harness decides the billing. The GitHub Copilot harness, which builds agents and workflows for end to end processes, is fully consumption billed. The standard harness, for rule based agents and agent flows, and the Copilot Chat harness, for agents that extend Microsoft Copilot with your knowledge, are included in the Copilot licence when they run in Microsoft channels. I wrote about what the new harness changes when it landed.
On the GitHub Copilot harness the meter runs in two places. Building consumes credits whenever a language model is doing the work: natural language authoring, evaluation and preview. Manual configuration does not.
| Creation | Conversation turns | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Light | 1 to 2 | 1 to 20 |
| Medium | 3 to 5 | 21 to 60 |
| Heavy | 6 or more | 61 or more |
Running an agent or workflow then costs by the same four buckets as Cowork.
| Runtime | Shape | Credits per run |
|---|---|---|
| Light | Check one source, post one summary | 100 to 300 |
| Medium | Compile a day’s activity from several sources | 300 to 500 |
| Heavy | Multi-year audit across systems with a full report | more than 500 |
An evaluation run is a set of real requests to the agent, so a hundred test cases is a hundred billable runs on this harness.
Work IQ APIs
Work IQ is the intelligence layer under Copilot, and Microsoft now sells access to it through APIs so that agents built anywhere, Copilot Studio or Azure Foundry included, can reason over Microsoft 365 data with permissions intact. Two charges apply.
| API | Charge | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Work IQ chat and context | Variable, driven by grounding, retrieval and reasoning | Scales with the query |
| Work IQ tools | Fixed, per action | 0.1 per call |
Two clarifications in the guide matter. Work IQ APIs are not an entitlement of the Copilot licence, so an agent that calls them draws credits even for licensed users. And there is no charge for Work IQ inside the Copilot experiences themselves: chat, the apps and the built in agents use it for free. The older Retrieval and Chat APIs keep their current licensing, which Microsoft describes as “for now”. I explained what the layer does in the Work IQ post.
Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform
Prebuilt and custom agents in Dynamics 365 consume credits, which pool at the tenant and should be allocated to environments. In Power Apps and Power Automate, credits apply only when AI is invoked: an embedded Copilot Studio agent, an AI prompt or tool, a generative feature beyond what the licence entitles. A flow that moves data without touching a model draws nothing, which is the same billing line that separates Power Automate from Copilot Studio workflows.
How I use this with a firm
The sequence has not changed since Cowork went to consumption billing, it has just acquired more rows.
- Count the people, group them by how they will use Cowork and multiply by the bands. That is the Cowork line.
- List the agents, workflows and apps you expect to run, estimate runs a month and pick a band for each. That is the Copilot Studio line.
- Add the Work IQ calls if your agents use the APIs rather than the built in grounding.
- Start on pay as you go with thresholds set in the admin centre, read the real numbers for three months and only then look at the Pre-Purchase tiers.
That exercise is part of what a Discover engagement produces, and rechecking it as Microsoft revises the guide is one of the jobs Embed exists for. If you want every line added up for one firm, licences, build, credits, connectors and support, that is what a first agent costs a 30-person firm in year one. If you would like the sums done for your own tenant rather than in the abstract, book a free consultation.
Change log
Microsoft’s own log from the back of the guide, which I will extend as editions arrive.
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| September 2026 | Apps in Copilot Studio added as a paid public preview; apps in Copilot Cowork added under the Frontier programme. |
| August 2026 | Copilot Studio harnesses documented: Copilot Chat, standard and GitHub Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot renamed Microsoft Copilot throughout. |
Sources checked
Last checked: 11 September 2026. All pricing in the guide is in US dollars and subject to change.
Related reading
More on Copilot Licensing
Common questions