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25,000 Copilot Studio credits cost $200 a month – and if you don’t spend them, they’re gone for good at the end of the month, no rollover. That’s the simple number.
It gets more complicated with the three other ways to get credits, with what actually changed on September 1, 2026, and with the fact that Copilot Cowork now draws on the same card too. I sketched out this exact model in my talk at the m365 Show in September 2026 (video at the end of this article). Here’s the full version, checked against the current official Microsoft documentation – including one clarification that came out a bit compressed in the short conference version.
What a credit actually costs
Since September 1, 2025, the unified billing currency for Copilot Studio agents has been called Copilot Credits – before that, contracts ran on messages, or on billed sessions. The amount per package and the pay-as-you-go rate didn’t change in the switch, only the unit.
The official consumption table for the standard harness looks like this:
- Classic Answer: 1 credit
- Generative Answer: 2 credits
- Agent Action: 5 credits
- Tenant Graph Grounding (access to data across the entire tenant): 10 credits
- Agent flow actions: 13 credits per 100 runs
- AI tools, tiered by quality: Basic 1 credit per 10 answers, Standard 15, Premium 100, Content Processing 8 credits per page
- Voice: Classic 10, GenAI 35, Premium GenAI 75 credits per minute
- Reasoning models: the relevant feature rate, plus the premium tool rate of 10 credits per 1,000 tokens on top
If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and use an agent in the standard harness under your own identity, that internal use costs nothing extra. That’s a fourth way to get credits that’s often overlooked, alongside Capacity Pack, Prepaid, and Pay-as-you-go – which makes it four ways to get credits, not three.
Four ways to get credits
- Included for free for users with their own Microsoft 365 Copilot license, for internal use in the standard harness.
- Capacity Pack: 25,000 credits for $200 a month, licensed tenant-wide. Unused credits expire at the end of the month with no rollover – “Credit usage is counted on a monthly basis and resets on the first day of the month,” according to Microsoft’s official FAQ.
- Pre-Purchase Plan (unit: Copilot Credit Commit Unit, CCCU): a one-year term, tiered discounts of up to 20% versus pay-as-you-go, purchased as an Azure reservation. Microsoft’s official worked example: Tier 2 with 15,000 CCCU costs around $14,100 for 1.5 million credits. The lower entry amounts that circulate alongside this couldn’t be confirmed as official, fixed tier thresholds – before you buy, it’s worth checking the Azure portal under Reservations.
- Pay-as-you-go: $0.01 per credit with no upfront purchase, available since December 1, 2024. You activate it through a billing policy in the Power Platform admin center, which gets linked to an Azure subscription and connected to an environment – and can be disconnected again at any time.
What actually happened on September 1, 2026
In the talk, it sounded like every environment has had to be connected to a credit pool or pay-as-you-go since September 2026, or agents simply stop working. That’s the gist of it, but the precise version is narrower: it’s the end of a grace period, specifically for developer and trial environments under the GitHub Copilot harness – the new, agentic third harness in Copilot Studio, alongside the standard harness and classic Copilot Studio. Verbatim, from the official docs:
“Developer and trial environments moved to usage-based billing on September 1, 2026.”
Before that, building and testing there wasn’t billable. Since September 1, 2026, every build, test, and evaluation activity there counts against credits – without available credits, nothing runs in these environments anymore.
For the standard harness, the broader rule has applied for longer – since the switch to the credit model on September 1, 2025: an environment with no credits or pay-as-you-go runs into overage enforcement, which kicks in at 125% of available capacity. Agents then get disabled, though conversations already in progress are still wrapped up cleanly. A finer-grained, separate rule – agent flow enforcement – blocks only new flow runs, and kicks in earlier, as soon as prepaid capacity is used up.
Cowork and apps: a new cost center with its own management
Copilot Cowork has been generally available since June 16, 2026, and fully billable since July 1, 2026. Microsoft officially lists “Cowork, Apps built with Copilot Cowork, Work IQ API” explicitly as services that run on usage-based billing – the same credit currency as Copilot Studio, but with its own cost unit for building apps inside Cowork, whose rollout roughly coincided with the talk (early to mid-September 2026, according to third-party sources – not confirmed on a dated official Microsoft page).
This matters for governance: it’s the same currency, but a different management layer. You manage classic Copilot Studio agents in the Power Platform admin center. Cowork, apps built in Cowork, and the Work IQ API, on the other hand, run through Cost Management in the Microsoft 365 admin center – with spending policies per user or group, threshold alerts, a credit-request workflow, and a /cost slash command right inside Cowork for a live cost readout on a running task. Both layers draw from the same tenant pool: Capacity Pack credits you assign to an environment in Power Platform are correspondingly no longer available to Cowork in the M365 admin center.
What you should configure as an admin this week
For classic Copilot Studio agents, you’ll find three tabs under Licensing → Copilot Studio in the Power Platform admin center that together give you cost control:
- Summary – a tenant-wide capacity overview with prepaid and pay-as-you-go figures and a three-month trend.
- Environments – credit consumption per environment, status (within capacity or in overage), and whether an allocation or pay-as-you-go is active.
- Manage Agents – every billable agent tenant-wide, individually, with month-to-date consumption and status (Within limit, Nearing limit, Over limit). This is where you set a monthly credit limit per agent, a notification threshold, and optionally a hard stop (“Stop usage”).
There’s explicitly no tenant-wide default limit – Microsoft’s own docs state plainly that the Power Platform admin center provides no default agent limit. You have to set it yourself per agent, or automate it through the Power Platform API.
Equally important: Azure budget alerts don’t stop anything. They notify you, with a delay, but they let an environment keep running regardless. Only the agent limit with “Stop usage” delivers an actual stop. For a rough estimate before you even test live, there’s Microsoft’s official Copilot Studio Agent Usage Estimator.
As a basic framework for sustainable governance, Microsoft itself proposes a four-layer model: Tenant (who’s allowed to allocate capacity at all), Environment (allocation, tenant-pool access, pay-as-you-go), Agent (monthly limit, notification, hard stop), and Process (a named cost owner, a path for alert escalations, an approval process before the next environment). It fits well to classify environments by purpose from the start – exploration, test/validation, funded production – rather than bolting governance on afterward.
What you can do this week
- In the Power Platform admin center, check under Manage Agents which agents are currently running without a monthly limit.
- Set a limit with a notification threshold for every production agent – and add “Stop usage” for critical cases.
- Clarify whether dev/trial environments on the GitHub Copilot harness still have a valid credit source since September 1, 2026, before anyone keeps building there.
- Check in the Microsoft 365 admin center whether Cowork and its apps already have their own spending policies – or are drawing uncontrolled on the same tenant pool as your Copilot Studio environments.
- Name a cost owner per environment before the next team starts testing, not after.
If you want to build exactly this kind of credit and environment management for your Copilot Studio rollout, that’s a job for Coaching for IT and Admins.
The full talk, with the complete ten-step model for agent readiness, is on YouTube: “Copilot Studio & Agents: So bereitest du dein Unternehmen vor” (in German; m365 Show, Mirko Peters’ channel).
Sources: Microsoft Learn – Billing and licensing, Requirements and messages management, Billing FAQ, Billing credit overview (Agents experience), Enforcement policy for credits, Govern credit consumption, Manage usage – GitHub Copilot harness, Pay-as-you-go overview, Copilot Credit Pre-Purchase Plan, Usage-based billing overview; Microsoft – Copilot Studio Pricing, Copilot Cowork GA announcement. As of September 15, 2026 – prices, quotas, and thresholds at Microsoft tend to change several times a year.
