Copilot is no longer budgeted per seat: five Microsoft dates between 16 October and 31 December 2026

Until this autumn, a Copilot budget was a number of seats multiplied by a price. On 5 October we described the new model: everyday AI in the licence, advanced AI metered in Copilot Credits at $0.01 each. In October, Microsoft filled in the calendar. Here are the five dates, all taken from Microsoft's announcements to its partners and from the Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes.

The five dates

Date	What changes	Source
16 October 2026	Add-on offers are renamed with "(add-on)", for example "Microsoft 365 Copilot (add-on)". Product and SKU IDs, prices, renewal terms and service do not change.	Partner Center, 14 October
27 October 2026	Work IQ APIs move to usage-based billing: developers can invoke agents and models without pre-assigned licences, and "billing is now based on fixed or variable costs invoked per API request". The same entry lets admins create custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors in the Microsoft 365 admin center and deploy them across Microsoft 365, so that Copilot uses the organisation's proprietary data.	Release notes, 27 October
1 November 2026	AI Builder capacity add-ons are retired from sale. Existing credits remain usable until the end of the current term; partners must turn off auto-renew before the next renewal; customers who want to keep AI Builder features afterwards should plan on Copilot Credits. New Copilot offers appear in the price list preview.	Partner Center, 22 and 14 October
1 December 2026	New Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Business offers can be bought without a qualifying base subscription, at the same price as the current offers; add-on offers reach end of sale in CSP (existing customers can renew and change seat counts). For new Copilot Business licences bought through CSP, usage-based billing is on by default, with a default limit of 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month, adjustable by admins.	Partner Center, 14 October and 1 October (updated 14 October)
Until 31 December 2026	Promotions: 25% off the Business Basic + Copilot Business bundle and 15% off standalone Copilot Business (1 to 300 seats, annual) for eligible SMB customers; and for customers buying at least 300 new Microsoft 365 E7 seats with pay-as-you-go enabled, Microsoft matches each Copilot Studio capacity pack 1:1 for 12 months, up to 5 packs.	Partner Center, 29 and 21 October

Two further points from the same month. Copilot Studio "Agent Accounts", announced on 23 October and in private preview since 15 October, let teams build and manage agents for recurring business processes, with governance, permissions, triggers and process memory. And the Copilot release notes of 27 October add new usage metrics to the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights, which Microsoft presents as improving "data granularity and security auditing capabilities".

What is not in these announcements

Microsoft's partner pages do not give the credit rates per Copilot Studio capacity pack, the list prices of those packs, or the exact prices of the 1 December offers beyond "priced the same as the current offers". The 1 December default is not initially available in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain; Microsoft says it will share more as availability expands. Nothing in this article is our own arithmetic.

What it means for a CIO

The list price is stable; the shape of the spend is not. A growing share of Copilot is metered, by request for the Work IQ APIs, by credit for advanced features and agents. The default limit of 4,000 credits per user per month is the vendor's value, not a budget: 100 users can reach 400,000 credits in a month, in Microsoft's own example. Promotions that match capacity packs or discount seats until 31 December are also a reason to buy before the consumption has been measured.

The same month widens what Copilot can read. Custom MCP connectors deployed from the admin center give Copilot access to proprietary data sources chosen by the organisation. Each connector is an extension of the knowledge Copilot draws on, with the same questions as any reference source: who owns it, what it exposes, who may query it, and when it was last reviewed.

What to check this week

1. Where you buy. CSP or Enterprise agreement, Business or Enterprise licences, in which country. That decides whether the 1 December default reaches you.
2. The spending policy. Does one exist, with an Azure subscription attached, who set the limit, and who receives the alert when a user reaches it.
3. AI Builder. Which credits expire at the end of the current term, which flows depend on them, and whether auto-renew has been turned off as Microsoft asks partners to do.
4. Scripts and catalogue mappings that rely on offer names rather than product and SKU IDs: Microsoft asked for them to be updated by 16 October.
5. Work IQ API consumption. Which applications call agents or models through these APIs, and who reads the per-request billing.
6. Connectors. The list of MCP connectors deployed or planned, with an owner, a scope and a review date, before they reach users.

What a solid team does differently

It tracks Copilot cost per use case and per agent every month, next to what that usage produced, as in the routine for maintaining an AI agent in production. It sets its own limits before the first invoice. And it treats each new connector as a change to the company's reference sources, with an owner and a date, rather than as a feature switched on by an admin. Our Microsoft practice runs this kind of review before a Copilot rollout.

The danger, the advice

The danger	The advice
The 2027 Copilot budget is a number of seats times a price, while a growing share of the spend is now metered by request and by credit.	Add a consumption line to the budget, measured on a pilot group, and set your own limits before the first invoice.
AI Builder credits expire at the end of the term and the flows that depend on them stop, with no Copilot Credits provisioned.	List the flows that use AI Builder today, and decide now how they will be funded after the term.
MCP connectors are deployed from the admin center without a review of what they expose or to whom.	Treat each connector as a reference source: owner, scope, permitted users, review date, before it reaches users.
A year-end promotion drives a purchase before anyone has measured what the organisation actually consumes.	Measure one month of credit consumption before committing to capacity packs or additional seats.