Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Turns On Pay-as-You-Go by Default for New Partner Purchases From December 1 - With a 4,000-Credit Monthly Limit per User

From December 1, 2026, Microsoft will make usage-based billing the default when customers buy new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licenses through CSP (reseller partners). Purchases come with an Azure billing setup and a spending policy that by default caps each user at 4,000 Copilot Credits a month. The start date was pushed back from November 2.

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From December 1, 2026, any Microsoft 365 Copilot Business license newly purchased through CSP will come with usage-based billing switched on from the start, Microsoft says¹. CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) is the channel in which customers buy through reseller partners. Pay-as-you-go becomes the default billing configuration, and Microsoft says the aim is to let customers use features billed by consumption, such as Copilot Cowork, Work IQ APIs and GitHub Copilot Harness, without extra setup. Microsoft first gave the start date as November 2 and moved it to December 1 in an update on October 14.

In practice, a mechanism that bills Copilot Credits for what people actually use, on top of the monthly per-seat fee, will be live from the moment of purchase. By default, each user can spend up to 4,000 Copilot Credits a month; in Microsoft’s own example, a 100-user customer could therefore run through as many as 400,000 credits monthly¹. Admins can change the limit.

What gets set up automatically at purchase

According to Microsoft’s guidance for CSP partners, a partner used to have to obtain an Azure Plan, ask for granular delegated admin privileges (GDAP) and then sign in for the customer before usage-based billing could be switched on². Microsoft says that because of these steps, the majority of eligible customers never had it turned on. Under the new approach, Partner Center sets up the Azure billing pieces and a default spending policy as part of checkout. At launch there is no separate step in which the customer explicitly opts in.

The same guidance estimates that about 75% of customers who buy Copilot Business via CSP do not currently use Azure through their partner. For those customers, the order review screen warns that completing the purchase will automatically create an Azure Plan, an Azure subscription and a resource group.

A new purchase is not the only trigger. The guidance lists three:

A new purchase of an eligible SKU (a default policy covering the whole tenant is created)
Adding seats to an existing Copilot Business subscription (when the seats are added in the Partner Center portal; changing seat counts through the API does not create one)
Converting a Copilot trial to an eligible paid SKU

The default policy is created only when the customer has no spending or billing policy yet; if one already exists from another partner or another channel, no duplicate is made. When a policy is newly created, the defaults are a tenant-wide limit of 1.2 million credits and a per-user limit of 4,000 credits. The guidance also notes that it describes features that have not been released and that the API shapes may change before general availability.

Which contracts are in scope

Only Copilot Business (the Business SKUs) is covered; Microsoft 365 Copilot (Enterprise) is not². The change applies to commercial contracts only, so education, nonprofit and GCC Low customers are excluded. Besides standalone Copilot Business, the eligible SKUs include bundles that pair Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard or Premium with Copilot Business.

The rollout starts with eligible customers in supported markets; at first, customers in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain will not get it¹. Japan is not on that exclusion list. A Japanese small or midsize business that buys Microsoft 365 through a CSP partner and plans to add Copilot Business after December would be safer preparing on the assumption that the change applies to it.

In August, Microsoft set out plans to merge the consumer Copilot app and Microsoft 365 Copilot into a single app. This change can be read as reducing, from the billing side, the effort needed before businesses start using consumption-billed features such as Cowork in the work version of Copilot.

Settings admins should review

If the defaults are left in place, the spending policy settings determine how much can be consumed. In the Microsoft 365 admin center under Copilot > Cost Management, a few points are worth checking³.

First, the spending policy’s “Auto-apply new services” setting is on by default. While it is on, Copilot services and agents that Microsoft newly brings under usage-based billing are added to the policy automatically. Microsoft itself notes that this setting should be turned off for any policy where future services should be reviewed before they are allowed.

Second, the per-user limit. Once users hit their cap, the covered agents and services are blocked for them until the month ends, and the allowance starts over on the 1st. If the organization has prepaid credits through capacity packs or a pre-purchase plan, those are used first before pay-as-you-go applies. Whether to keep the 4,000-credit default for everyone or to set different limits by department or role is best decided before buying. Policies scoped to specific users or groups are created in the admin center, not in Partner Center².

Billing will look different too. Usage-based charges appear on the invoice separately from the Copilot Business seat charge². Since adding seats can turn on usage-based billing tenant-wide, the guidance warns that consumption charges may appear across the tenant even if the triggering purchase covered only some of its seats.

On how to stop usage-based billing, the guidance is not consistent with itself. One section says that once configured it cannot be fully turned off and that spending is stopped by setting the limit to zero; another says limits cannot be set under the platform minimum, so removing the policy is the sole way to halt spending completely². Once a policy is removed, charges for later usage stop right away, though the tenant still owes for usage incurred before that. Since the guidance covers unreleased features, anyone who actually needs to stop it should confirm with the documentation current at that time and with their partner.

A second change on December 1

The way Copilot is purchased also changes on December 1. New Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Business offers that do not require a Microsoft 365 base subscription become available in every channel, including CSP, at the same price as the current offers¹. Since October 16 the current offers carry “(add-on)” in their names, and they stop being sold through CSP on December 1. End of sale is not end of life: existing contracts can still be renewed and their seat counts adjusted.

For the move to the new offers, Microsoft says no action is needed on existing subscriptions. Usage-based billing by default, however, can be triggered by any of the events the guidance lists: a new purchase, adding seats in the portal, or converting a trial.

Under SpaceXSI’s The X Subscription, using third-party models in Cursor now falls outside the included usage and is billed by consumption on Premium and higher plans. Organizations that have budgeted on seat fees alone will increasingly need to treat setting limits as part of the purchasing process. For Copilot Business, it makes sense to ask the partner at the quote stage how the default policy will be configured when the licenses are delivered.