From 1 December 2026, pay-as-you-go billing will be switched on by default for new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licences bought through a Microsoft partner. Microsoft’s announcement, posted on 1 October, moved the date from 2 November.
If you are about to buy Copilot seats, or a partner is about to buy them for you, someone needs to decide what the firm will spend on usage before the first bill arrives, not after.
What Microsoft has actually said
The usage billing sits alongside the fixed licence. Some features are charged by use, in units called Copilot Credits. Microsoft names Copilot Cowork, Work IQ APIs and GitHub Copilot Harness as examples of what is covered.
The change applies to new purchases, standalone or in a bundle. Microsoft says the default spending limit will be 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month, and that admins can adjust it.
I could not find a pound price per credit on Microsoft’s own pages, so I am not going to guess what 4,000 credits costs. Microsoft links a Copilot Credit Estimator from its documentation. Use it before you buy, not after.
Check the default, do not assume it
Limits are set in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, under Copilot, Cost Management, Configuration, then Add spending policy. You choose all users or specific groups, an optional cap per person, and who receives the alerts. When someone reaches their limit, they lose access to those services until credits reset on the 1st of the month.
Microsoft’s setup page for these policies shows the monthly budget defaulting to unlimited, and new services being added to the policy automatically. That sits oddly beside a 4,000 credit default. The two pages may be describing different things, and I could not tell from them which one your tenant will show. Look at the screen itself before you rely on either.
The 30-minute job before you buy
Name the person who owns the Copilot bill. Decide which group of staff actually needs the usage-billed features, rather than leaving them open to everyone. Pick a monthly figure you would be comfortable seeing on an invoice, set the per-person cap, and send the alert to a named person, not a shared inbox nobody reads. Then write the decisions down where the business keeps its records.
That person also needs admin rights. If only one member of staff holds the admin role, fix that first, as covered in the Microsoft 365 admin access post. It is the same pattern as the custom GPTs only one person can migrate. The software is fine. The ownership was never decided.
If you want help working out which of your tools the business actually depends on, and who controls them, the free audit at digilyse.co takes about ten minutes.
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