Microsoft Copilot
Copilot isn't one product with one price. It's a per-seat license, a pool of metered credits for the agentic work on top, and a separate governance layer once agents start acting on their own. Quoting it as a single per-user figure is how budgets get missed — so here are the layers, and an estimate of what the metered part costs in a month.
Working out the license underneath it first? Microsoft Licensing takes four questions to the base stack.
What you're actually buying
- Microsoft 365 Copilot · $44.90 per user / per month
- The per-seat license, and the prerequisite for everything else. Buys Copilot across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, plus Copilot Chat and the built-in Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator agents. Sits on top of a base license — Business Premium, E3 or E5 — rather than replacing one.
- Copilot Cowork · usage-based — Copilot Credits
- Agentic work that runs a task through to a result rather than helping you write one. Needs a Copilot license first, then bills separately on credits, pay-as-you-go or pre-purchased. There is no per-seat number to quote, which is what the estimator below is for.
- Copilot Studio · separate consumption spend
- Where custom agents are actually built and run. Priced on its own consumption, so budget it apart from seats — and plan the governance before, not after, the first agent goes live.
- Agent 365 · $22.40 per user / per month
- Identity, inventory and monitoring for agents — onboarding a digital worker the way you would a human one. Worth it the moment agents start acting on data without a person driving each step.
- Security Copilot · Security Compute Units
- The SOC-side Copilot, metered in SCUs rather than seats. The top enterprise bundles include an allocation — the licensing tool shows which.
Per-seat prices are Australian list (AUD, excluding GST) on an annual commitment, last checked July 28, 2026. Consumption-based items have no list seat price by design.
Copilot Cowork — usage-based cost estimator
Cowork is a usage-based add-on, not a per-seat price. It needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot license as a prerequisite, then bills separately on Copilot Credits on pay-as-you-go, with volume discounts on pre-purchase. What follows is a rough planning range only — real spend moves with task complexity and how much people actually use it.
One caveat specific to this estimator: Microsoft meters credits in US$0.01 and publishes no Australian credit rate — usage bills through Azure and converts to your agreement currency at invoice time. The AUD figures below are converted at A$1.4287 per US$1 as at 27 July 2026. That is an exchange-rate assumption rather than a Microsoft list price, so it will drift — every other price in this tool is published Australian list.
- Per-task credit ranges (Microsoft's July 2026 planning estimates): light 100–300, medium 300–700, heavy 700+. Microsoft publishes no heavy-task ceiling, so treat any heavy figure as a floor rather than a cap.
- The ranges assume a frontier model. Microsoft's lighter model is designed to cost less, so read this as a planning ceiling on the light and medium bands, not a floor.
- Credits pool at the tenant level, so this is estimated tenant monthly spend, not a per-seat charge.
- Pay-as-you-go is US$0.01 per credit with no commitment. A one-year Pre-Purchase Plan offers volume discounts from 5% (300K credits) up to 20% (300M credits) for tenants that want to lock a rate in.
What are Copilot Credits?
Copilot Credits are the shared usage currency behind Cowork, the Work IQ APIs, Copilot Studio agents, and AI features in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. You pay for work performed rather than a flat per-seat fee — think of the Copilot license as the fixed connection and the credits as metered usage. Admins can set spending limits and alerts, and usage stays off until it is switched on.
One important distinction: the native Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences — Copilot Chat, AI in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, and the built-in Researcher, Analyst, and Facilitator agents — do not incur separate Work IQ charges. Credits only apply when Work IQ is called directly through its APIs inside a custom-built agent or solution.
Copilot Credits usage-based billing ↗Before you license the whole org
Copilot pays off where the data underneath it is already governed — and surfaces every oversharing problem you have where it isn't. A readiness pass over permissions, sharing links and labelling is cheaper than discovering it through Copilot, and it's the part most rollouts skip.
If you're sizing a pilot or sanity-checking a quote, I'm happy to look at it properly — get in touch.
Talk it throughShadow IT is independent and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of Microsoft. Product names and documentation links belong to Microsoft, which changes both pricing and packaging without notice — always confirm current figures before you budget or quote.