On 25 September Microsoft wrote down something that had been true in practice for a year: the Copilot licence pays for everyday AI, and anything heavier runs on a second meter called Copilot Credits. That is a reasonable model. The problem for anyone planning a rollout is that the two meters are documented across forty Learn pages, a thirty-page credits guide and a partner announcement, and the admin settings that keep the second meter off are spread over three portals. We pulled it into one page.
Two meters, one licence
Microsoft's own description is a plug-in hybrid. The user subscription licence is the battery: a fixed price per user per month that covers Copilot Chat, Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Teams, the built-in agents, Work IQ grounding over your tenant, and model choice between Auto, GPT-5.6 and Claude Sonnet 5. Usage-based billing is the fuel tank, drawn on when a task needs more than the battery gives: Cowork, Code, Autopilot, the frontier models, and agentic work in SharePoint and OneDrive. The second meter needs the licence to unlock, then bills on top.
What makes this workable is that the second meter is off until someone turns it on. In an enterprise tenant nothing bills until an administrator creates a spending policy in the Microsoft 365 admin centre or a billing plan in the Power Platform admin centre. That is a deliberate design, and it is the basis of part 2 of the page.
What is actually capped
Only two inclusions carry a published number: Researcher at 25 queries a user a month, and the Interpreter agent in Teams at 20 hours a user a month. Everything else in the licence is fair use, which Microsoft does not quantify. Claude Opus 5 is a special case. It is in the picker and included to a limit Microsoft has not printed; at the limit the user is offered Auto at no cost or Opus on credits.
Older summaries of the licence quoted a daily cap on Notebook audio overviews. We could not find a current Microsoft page that states one, so the map lists it as unpublished rather than repeating it. That is the standard we applied throughout: each cell on the page carries a numbered source, and where Microsoft is silent the page says so.
The settings that decide whether you can be billed
Credits can only be charged through a billing object an administrator creates. There are five places one can exist, and the lockdown checklist walks each one:
- The spending policies under Copilot cost management in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, where the Get started wizard creates a default policy scoped to all users. A policy is an access grant, not a budget, so a policy with a tiny limit still opens Cowork to everyone in its scope.
- The older pay-as-you-go billing policies on the same node, which meter Copilot Chat agents and SharePoint agents for people without the licence.
- Billing plans and environment credit allocations in the Power Platform admin centre, including a default that lets every new environment draw from the tenant's unallocated credits.
- Self-service trials and purchases, which have to be blocked product by product.
- The Azure subscription behind any of the above, which leaves a Power Platform account resource behind even after the plan is deleted.
Two changes are worth knowing about before they arrive. From 1 December 2026, new Copilot Business subscriptions bought through a partner come with usage-based billing switched on at a default of 4,000 credits a user a month. Australia is excluded at launch and Microsoft has not given a date. And developer and trial environments in Copilot Studio have billed for GitHub Copilot harness agents since 1 September 2026, which caught a few pilots that had been free.
Why this sits under Governance
In the GIVE framework, Governance is the pillar that decides what an organisation lets AI do and under what controls, before Ideas and Value have anything to work with. The Copilot meter is the clearest current example. Left at defaults, a tenant drifts into a usage-based bill nobody approved; locked down, it runs on a fixed line that finance can plan. Neither is wrong. The point is that it should be a decision, taken with the trade-off in view: the lockdown gives up Cowork, Code and the frontier models for everyone, and reopening one lever for one group with a cap and alerts is a small, reversible step.
We will keep the page current. A weekly check reads it against Microsoft's documentation and the date in each part's heading is the last time it passed.
Open the map: what the licence includes, and the lockdown checklist