Copilot Chat
Work and web grounding, Pages, file upload, image generation, priority access.1
This page is the reference behind our insight What the Microsoft Copilot licence includes, and how to keep the meter off. Part 1 maps the licence; part 2 is the checklist that keeps a tenant from being billed Copilot Credits. Every claim carries a numbered source, listed at the end of each part.
We re-check this page against Microsoft's documentation weekly. The date in each part's heading is the last check.
Part 1 · what the licence includes · as at 30 October 2026
What Microsoft 365 Copilot (now sold as Microsoft Copilot) includes per user, where a published cap applies, what runs on Copilot Credits instead, and what Microsoft still has not put a number on.
Nothing here draws Copilot Credits when a licensed person uses it. Microsoft publishes no numeric fair-use threshold for any of it.
Work and web grounding, Pages, file upload, image generation, priority access.1
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Teams meetings and chat, Loop, Forms.1
Semantic index over mail, calendar, files, people and Teams. The intelligence layer itself is included; only its API is metered.1,2
Universal search, Copilot Notebooks with files and meetings as references, audio overviews.1
Microsoft's own agents inside Copilot run on the licence. Researcher and Analyst carry a cap (next band).2
Real-time voice, and camera or screen vision during a voice session. Licensed users only; no admin toggle for voice today.3
Auto routes each prompt by accuracy, speed and cost. GPT-5.6 and Sonnet 5 are selectable under fair use.4,5
Classic and generative answers, tenant graph grounding, actions, prompts and workflows are zero-rated when a licensed user runs the agent in Copilot Chat, Teams or SharePoint.6,7
Runs on the "When an agent calls the flow" trigger, with a licensed user in the chat, are no charge. Any other trigger bills.6
Ask, find, catch up; create files, pages, lists, libraries; simple rules and approvals; Autofill metadata that fills over time.8
Agents on instructions, public web or tenant data, used by a licensed person: no extra charge.9
No extra cost for licensed users. The Retrieval API has a pay-as-you-go preview for unlicensed users only.10
Copilot Dashboard, usage reports, oversharing controls and restricted content discovery.7
Included, with a published monthly allowance (next band).11
The licence gives maker access to build standard-harness agents. Building on the GitHub Copilot harness is metered from the first prompt.12
These are the only inclusions with a stated allowance. Counts reset on a calendar month.
The Researcher FAQ states 25 a month. Microsoft's launch note said the 25 is shared with Analyst; the Analyst FAQ no longer states a figure, so treat the pool as shared until Microsoft says otherwise.13,14
Real-time speech interpretation in meetings. Past 20 hours, access depends on available capacity rather than stopping outright.11
"Included with limits." At the limit you get a warning, then a choice: switch to Auto at no cost, or keep Opus on credits. The threshold is unpublished.4,5
The zero-rating for licensed users is "limited to fair usage limits" that Microsoft reserves the right to change.6
Copilot summarises meetings up to 30 days back. A scope on the feature rather than a quota.1
Microsoft's licensing page lists reaching a USL limit as "coming soon", with in-product warnings before any limit bites.4
Every item here bills in Copilot Credits, and most need the licence as a prerequisite. In an enterprise tenant nothing bills until an admin creates a spending policy or billing plan.5,15
The agentic system that runs multi-step work. Model responses, tool and skill calls, image generation and browser tasks all count. Access is granted only by a spending policy.16Light task tens of credits; heavy tasks hundreds
Build dashboards, trackers and apps from plain language. Metered through the same spending policies as Cowork.17
Named by Microsoft as a usage-based experience alongside Cowork and Code.4
GPT Astra and Claude Fable class models run on credits, not the licence, in any surface.4,5
Large or unbounded content sets, whole-site creation, bulk edits, scheduled AI workflows, real-time Advanced Autofill, image generation into libraries, site analytics. Copilot asks the user to confirm before credits are spent.8
Listed as a usage-based service in Cost management. Licence required to use it.15
Grounding, retrieval and reasoning for custom apps and agents, on any platform. Not an entitlement of the licence.2Tools API 0.1 credit per call; chat and context variable, roughly 15 to 100 credits a task
Hosting and running apps built in Cowork, Code or Copilot Studio. Power Apps Premium users are covered within their request limits.20.1 credit per API call
Agents, workflows and apps on this harness bill for everything, including natural-language authoring, preview and evals, whatever licence the user holds. Developer and trial environments bill since 1 September 2026.12,18
Never covered by the licence.6
Scheduled, event or autonomous runs bill at the standard rate for every action, agent calls included.613 credits per 100 actions
The same agent on a website, a custom app, a phone line or any non-M365 channel bills per feature.121 classic · 2 generative · 5 action · 10 graph grounding
Copilot Chat users can run metered agents that touch SharePoint or connector data only if an admin has turned on pay-as-you-go. Off by default.9,19About 12 credits for a grounded answer
Teams Phone Agent, the customer conversation harness and Contact Center Intelligence bill per call or conversation.2Phone calls 5 to 40+ credits each
Prebuilt and custom Dynamics agents, and MCP tool calls into Dataverse, Sales and Service, consume credits on top of their own licences.2
Where Microsoft says a limit exists but has not printed the number, or where the documentation is silent.
How many Opus prompts a licensed user gets before the Auto-or-credits choice. Reports describe a weekly cap, but no Microsoft page states one.5
"Fair use" and "subject to capacity" appear throughout. No figures.3,4
Older summaries quoted a daily cap. No current Microsoft documentation states one, so do not promise one.
The zero-rating is fair-use limited; the threshold is undefined and changeable.6
Microsoft says some capabilities start on usage-based billing and move into the licence later, sometimes arriving with a limit first.5
From 1 December 2026 new Copilot Business CSP subscriptions ship with usage-based billing on at 4,000 credits per user per month. Australia is excluded at launch; the date for Australia is not published.20
The simple takeaway
Budget the licence for everyday work and expect it to hold. Treat Cowork, Code, frontier models, at-scale SharePoint and custom agentic builds as a second, metered line in the plan, and decide before rollout whether that meter is switched on at all.
Part 1 sources, Microsoft Learn unless noted, read 30 October 2026
Part 2 · lock the meter · as at 30 October 2026
The levers that decide whether a tenant can ever be billed for Copilot Credits, where each one lives, and the setting that keeps it shut. Everything a licensed person does in Chat, the apps and standard agents stays inside the licence; this page keeps the meter from starting.
Four things have to be true before a single credit is billed. Break the chain at the first link and the rest never matters.
admin.microsoft.com. Global or Billing administrator to change billing; AI administrator for the settings. Nothing in this node bills until an admin presses Get started, so the first job is proving nobody has.1,2
Copilot › Cost management › Configuration
The Get started wizard creates the default policy. If a list of policies shows here, delete each one. Deleting stops future billing at once; usage already accrued is still owed. A policy is an access grant, not just a budget: scope and services matter, limits do not keep people out.2,3
Leak: a 1-credit All-users policy opens Cowork to the whole tenant
Spending policy › Scope · Select agents and services
Auto-apply is on by default and adds every future metered service to the policy without review. Per-user limits must be at least 2,000 credits a month, so a "tiny" policy is never a lock.2
Minimum per-user limit 2,000 credits
Copilot › Settings › All settings › Access to usage-based billing experiences › No users
Default is All users can request. With No users they see a learn-more link instead of a request that lands in an admin's queue. Takes up to 24 hours.4
Copilot › Settings › AI experiences enabled by usage-based billing
Controls visibility only. Microsoft is retiring it in favour of the request setting above, so set both while both exist.5
Copilot › Cost management › Classic Billing & usage › Pay-as-you-go services · Billing policies
This is the older route that meters Copilot Chat agents, SharePoint agents and the Retrieval API for people without the licence. Toggle each service to disconnected, then delete the policy.6
Billing › Pay-as-you-go
The same screen carries Microsoft 365 Backup, storage and high-volume email meters. Confirm no Copilot service is listed.1
Settings › Org settings › Services › Self-service trials and purchases › Do not allow
There is no tenant-wide switch; set each product, Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot included. Pair it with AllowAdHocSubscriptions off in Entra so viral trials cannot start.7
Copilot › Cost management › Configuration
New Copilot Business subscriptions arrive with usage-based billing on and 4,000 credits per user per month. Partner Center creates that policy only if the tenant has none, so an existing empty tenant gets one. Not yet in Australia; watch the message centre.8
100 users × 4,000 = 400,000 credits a month exposure
Copilot › Settings › AI providers operating as Microsoft subprocessors
Turning Anthropic off removes Claude from the picker; it does not stop credits and does not block Cowork. Opus has a licence limit; past it the user is offered Auto for free or credits, and credits only work if a policy exists.9
admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com. Power Platform or Global administrator. Credits here are charged to the environment an agent runs in, not to the person using it, so the controls are environmental.10
Licensing › Pay-as-you-go plans
A billing plan links environments to an Azure subscription. Remove the environment from the plan or delete the plan; billing stops at that moment. The special Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat plan creates an environment that cannot be deleted, only unlinked.11
Licensing › Copilot Studio › Manage Copilot Credits › environment › Capacity overages
On by default for eligible environments with no allocation. With it on, an environment spends any unallocated prepaid credits in the tenant. Publish the environment-group rule Cost controls - Draw from tenant credit pool to lock the setting across a group.10,12
New environments arrive with this on
Licensing › Copilot Studio › Manage Copilot Credits
If you own no capacity packs this is already zero. If you do, an allocation of zero plus no tenant draw means metered features in that environment stop with a "You need credits to continue" message rather than billing.13
Licensing › Copilot Studio › Manage Agents › Set limit
Hard stop turns the agent off at the limit. Limits apply with a delay, so leave a margin, and they do not stop agent flows the agent calls.12
Manage › Tenant settings › Add-on capacity assignment · Copilot Studio authors
Letting environment admins allocate gives them allocation rights across every environment. The authors group limits who can build under pay-as-you-go; it does not revoke access from licensed users, so manage environment roles as well.10,14
Manage › Copilot Studio › Harness column › GitHub Copilot
These agents bill for authoring, preview, evals and runtime regardless of licence, including developer and trial environments since 1 September 2026. With no funding attached they simply cannot be built.10
Billing starts at the first natural-language prompt, not at publish
Policies › Data policies
Block publishing to non-M365 channels (website, custom app, phone) and computer use where you do not want them. Standard-harness agents are zero-rated only inside Copilot Chat, Teams and SharePoint for licensed users.15
portal.azure.com. Owner or Contributor on the subscription. Pay-as-you-go can only bill a subscription someone with these rights attached.
Resource search › type "Power Platform account"
Creating a billing plan in either admin centre creates this resource. Deleting the plan does not delete it, so a leftover resource is the fingerprint of a plan that once existed. Confirm the plan is gone, then remove the resource.11
Cost Management + Billing › Reservations
P3 plans show as a reservation benefit. They are only consumed through a policy, but a bought plan is money already spent.16
Subscriptions list
If a Global administrator has no Azure subscription, the Cost management wizard offers to create one from the M365 billing account. Look for one you did not plan.1
Cost Management › Budgets
Azure budgets notify; they never stop Copilot Studio or Cowork consumption. The stopping points are policy scope, environment allocation and agent hard stops.10
With the three planes locked, metered features fail closed. These rules keep the things that still work from ever needing credits.
Zero-rating applies when the person in the chat is authenticated with a Microsoft Copilot licence. Unlicensed colleagues get web-only Chat and instruction-only agents.15,17
Topics, generative answers, tenant grounding, actions, prompts and workflows inside the agent are included. The GitHub Copilot harness never is.10
The same agent on a website, phone line or custom app bills per answer.15
Scheduled, event-driven and autonomous runs bill 13 credits per 100 actions, including the calls back to the agent.15
Opus is included to a limit, then it is Auto or credits. Frontier models are credits from the first prompt. With no policy, the credits option is dead.9,18
Copilot asks before it spends credits on unbounded or scheduled work. Without a policy it explains what it cannot complete and stops.19
All three bill for every call. Copilot's own Work IQ grounding in Chat and the apps is included and is not the API.20
Agent Builder agents incur no generative-answer charge unless they use tenant graph grounding for an unlicensed user.15
Agents created in a Teams environment with Copilot Studio for Teams do not consume credits, whoever uses them.21
The simple takeaway
Microsoft built the credits model so that it is off until an administrator turns it on. Check the three admin planes, delete what should not be there, lock the environment defaults, and the licence covers everything your people can still reach.
Part 2 sources, Microsoft Learn unless noted, read 30 October 2026
Our Governance Audit covers the Copilot cost controls on this page. There are four ways to work with us, and the first conversation is thirty minutes.