Microsoft 365 Licensing Advice

The three Business plans, in plain English

Prices below are from Microsoft's UK plans and pricing pages, checked in October 2026, per user a month, excluding VAT, for versions that include Teams. Microsoft changes prices from time to time, so we confirm the live figure before you buy.

All three are limited to 300 users. Microsoft also sells versions without Teams, and the bundles Business Standard with Copilot (£18.10) and Business Premium with Copilot (£24.60), both per user a month, paid yearly, ex VAT. The Copilot Business add-on is covered on our Copilot setup page.

What Premium actually adds

Business Premium is the plan we most often recommend for businesses that hold client data, but only when the features are switched on. Bought and left alone, it is just an expensive Standard licence. The main extras are:

• Microsoft Intune Plan 1 for managing laptops and phones, pushing updates and wiping lost devices. See Intune device management.
• Microsoft Entra ID P1, which unlocks Conditional Access: rules such as blocking sign-ins from outside the UK or requiring a managed device.
• Microsoft Defender for Business, endpoint protection with ransomware detection and response.
• Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, with Safe Links checking URLs when they are clicked and Safe Attachments.
• Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels and data loss prevention for email and files.
• Larger archive: 1.5 TB of archive storage per user compared with 50 GB on Basic and Standard.

Where businesses waste money

• Leavers still licensed. Convert their mailbox to a shared mailbox, which needs no licence under 50 GB, then remove the licence.
• Shared mailboxes with licences. info@ and accounts@ rarely need one.
• Everyone on the same plan. Warehouse or field staff who only need email and Teams on a phone can often use Basic, while office staff use Standard or Premium.
• Monthly subscriptions left running. Monthly terms cost 20% more on Microsoft's UK list prices. Stable headcounts are usually cheaper on annual terms.
• Duplicate security tools. Paying for third-party antivirus and email filtering on top of Premium's Defender features without a reason.

The trade-off with annual terms is flexibility. Under Microsoft's current commerce rules you can add licences any time, but reducing an annual subscription is only possible in a short window after purchase or at renewal. We plan renewals around that.

Our licence review

1. Export the licence and sign-in reports from the Microsoft 365 admin centre.
2. Match licences to real people and roles, and find unused, duplicate and leaver licences.
3. Check which paid features you already have but do not use.
4. Recommend a plan per person with the monthly and annual cost.
5. Make the changes, and set renewal reminders.

For a full look at your setup beyond licences, see our IT audit.

Other licences you may come across

• Exchange Online plans: email-only licences, useful for staff who only need a mailbox.
• Microsoft 365 Apps for business: desktop Office apps without business email, for people whose email lives elsewhere.
• Enterprise plans (E3 and E5): for organisations over 300 users or with specific compliance needs. Most small businesses do not need them.
• Add-ons such as Teams Phone, extra archive storage or Copilot, which sit on top of a base plan.

We check which of these you already have, often bought years ago by a previous supplier, and whether they still make sense.

Cost

A licence review is £45 an hour + VAT. For most small businesses it takes one to two hours, and the savings often cover it within a few months. On the Complete plan at £99 a month + VAT, licence changes for starters and leavers are part of the included Microsoft 365 helpdesk.

What it costs

Support plans from £25 a month + VAT, or £45 an hour + VAT for one-off fixes. Pick a plan if you want it looked after every month, or pay by the hour for a one-off job.

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