What Are Copilot Credits? Rates & Costs Explained
← so what *is* a Copilot Credit? the meter, minus the jargon
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The short version: Copilot Credits are Microsoft’s metered currency for agent work — the unit consumed when an agent answers, takes an action, or grounds on your data. They’re not a Copilot plan or licence. You buy them pay-as-you-go ($0.01/credit) or in prepaid packs, and a lot of internal, licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot usage is zero-rated.
🧩 Quick disambiguation — three things people mix up:
- Copilot Credits = the meter for agent work (this page).
- Copilot Pro / Microsoft 365 Premium / Microsoft 365 Copilot = per-user subscriptions for human-facing Copilot.
- Azure OpenAI tokens = raw model usage at the API level.
Credits are none of the other two. If you’re trying to pick a plan, start at the pricing hub instead.
What is a Copilot Credit?
A Copilot Credit is a unit of consumption. When a Copilot agent does something — answers a question, runs an action, grounds an answer on your tenant’s data — Microsoft measures that work in credits and draws them down from capacity your admin has set up.
The key idea: it’s a meter, not a seat. A per-user licence (Microsoft 365 Copilot is $30/user/month on the enterprise list; smaller organisations can instead buy Microsoft 365 Copilot Business — same capabilities, a lower list price of around $21/user/month, for up to 300 seats on a Microsoft 365 Business plan) is a flat subscription for a person. Credits are usage-based — they only move when an agent actually does work. Think electricity: the connection is your subscription; the kilowatt-hours are the credits.
What replaced “messages”?
Copilot Credits have a short history worth knowing, because the older term still floats around:
- Before 1 September 2025 — agent usage in Copilot Studio was counted in messages, sold in prepaid packs or pay-as-you-go.
- On 1 September 2025 — Microsoft changed the common currency from messages to Copilot Credits. Crucially, the prepaid pack quantity and the pay-as-you-go rate didn’t change — what changed is the name and the way usage is counted: from a flat per-message tally to feature-based rates, where different actions cost different amounts.
- Through 2026 — Microsoft’s documentation positions Copilot Credits as the consumption meter for agent work across its AI services — Copilot Studio (including the new GitHub Copilot harness), Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat agents, SharePoint agents, the Microsoft Copilot Retrieval API, Copilot Cowork, and agents calling Microsoft’s Work IQ APIs. Per-user Copilot stays for people; agent work is measured in credits — even though a lot of internal, licensed usage is zero-rated.
So if you see “messages” in an old doc or an existing capacity pack, read it as Copilot Credits. → Migrating from old message packs, dashboards or budgets? See Copilot Messages vs Copilot Credits — What Changed?. For how this fits the wider 2026 agent shift, see Microsoft Build 2026 Recap — Copilot Credits.
Where Copilot Credits are used
Credits are Microsoft’s cross-surface agent currency — they’re not only a Copilot Studio thing. The first rows below are the paid cases; the zero-rated row near the bottom is the big exception for licensed internal use:
| Surface | Copilot Credits consumed? |
|---|---|
| Copilot Studio agents published and used at scale | Yes |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat pay-as-you-go agents | Yes |
| SharePoint agents (outside the zero-rated case) | Yes |
| Autonomous / scheduled / triggered agent runs | Yes |
| Some first-party Dynamics 365 agents | Yes |
| Copilot Cowork and Work IQ API usage (managed in the Microsoft 365 admin centre) | Yes |
| Microsoft Copilot Retrieval API (Preview) | Yes |
| Copilot Studio agents on the GitHub Copilot harness — including building, previewing & testing | Yes |
| Employee-facing agents used by licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot users inside Microsoft 365 Copilot / Teams / SharePoint | Zero-rated (fair-use limits) |
| Per-user Copilot for people (Free, Microsoft 365 Premium, Microsoft 365 Copilot chat) | No — that’s a subscription, not credits |
The mental model: people using Copilot = subscriptions; agents doing work = credits — with internal, licensed, in-Microsoft-365 agent use mostly zero-rated.
How much does a Copilot Credit cost?
There are three ways to pay for credits. Microsoft labels them pay-as-you-go, prepaid capacity packs, and the pre-purchase plan:
| Way to buy | What it is | Headline rate (US, Jun 2026) | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay-as-you-go | Actual credits used, billed monthly via an Azure subscription | $0.01 per credit | Pilots, variable or low volume, no commitment |
| Prepaid capacity pack | A monthly block of credits (replenishes each month; no rollover) | $200 per 25,000 credits / month (≈$0.008/credit if fully used) | Steady, predictable usage |
| Pre-purchase plan (CCCUs) | One-year prepaid Copilot Credit Commit Units, via Azure reservations | Volume / agreement pricing | Larger, committed rollouts |
⚠️ Prepaid credits don’t roll over — unused credits in a month are lost, and usage can be limited once a pack is exhausted (unless you also enable pay-as-you-go for overage). Pay-as-you-go has no cap, but no volume discount either.
What actions consume credits — the rate card
This is the part people most want, and it’s why “one chat = one credit” is the wrong mental model. Consumption is feature-based. Watch the denominator too — some rates are per response, some per 10 responses, per page, per minute, or per 1,000 tokens. Published rates (US, June 2026):
| Action | Copilot Credits |
|---|---|
| Classic answer | 1 |
| Generative answer | 2 |
| Agent action | 5 |
| Tenant graph grounding (Microsoft 365 data) | 10 |
| Agent flow actions | 13 per 100 actions |
| AI tools (basic / standard / premium) | 1 / 15 / 100 per 10 responses |
| Reasoning (“deep reasoning”) models | feature rate + 10 / 1,000 tokens (premium AI tools) |
| Content processing | 8 per page |
| Voice — classic / GenAI / premium GenAI | 10 / 35 / 75 per minute |
A single user turn can stack several of these. Ask an agent a question that grounds on your tenant data and takes an action, and you’ve spent roughly 2 + 10 + 5 = 17 credits on one turn — about 17 cents pay-as-you-go.
A rate shown “per 1,000 tokens” or “per minute” is still billed in Copilot Credits — it’s a credit denomination, not a separate Azure OpenAI token bill.
⚠️ Computer use (CUA) is the exception to watch. It’s billed at the agent action rate (5 credits), and it runs on Standard or Premium models (premium models such as Claude Opus 4.6 cost more). Crucially, unlike ordinary agent actions, computer use is NOT zero-rated for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users — so even internal, licensed use of CUA consumes paid credits.
🏗️ If you’re specifically pricing a Copilot Studio build — the free-vs-paid boundary, the licensing options, and a worked monthly estimate — that’s its own guide: Is Copilot Studio Free? Pricing & Credits Explained. This page is the credit rate card those costs are built from.
What does NOT consume credits
Just as important as what costs credits is what doesn’t:
- Per-user subscriptions. Free Copilot, Microsoft 365 Premium and the human-facing Microsoft 365 Copilot experience are flat subscriptions — using Copilot as a person doesn’t burn credits.
- Building and testing. The Copilot Studio trial and in-context Agent Builder let you create and try agents — basic building and testing generally doesn’t require paid consumption; publishing and real usage is where credits start. (This holds on the standard harness. Agents on the newer GitHub Copilot harness are billed usage-based from the moment you start building — see Copilot Studio pricing.)
- Internal, licensed, in-Microsoft-365 agent use. A lot of employee-facing usage is zero-rated for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users — the decision table below shows exactly when.
⚠️ “Zero-rated” isn’t quite “unlimited free credits” — it’s included within fair-use limits for that specific employee-facing scenario.
Does Microsoft 365 Copilot include Copilot Credits?
A common question, so here’s the direct answer: no — a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence doesn’t come with a monthly allowance of Copilot Credits. What it gives you is zero-rated usage for the right scenarios, not a credit balance you can spend anywhere.
Included (zero-rated) when all of these are true:
- The user has a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence
- The agent is employee-facing / internal
- It runs inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams or SharePoint
- Usage stays within fair-use limits
You still buy credits for:
- External / customer-facing agents
- Unlicensed users (no Microsoft 365 Copilot licence)
- Standalone channels — public web, phone, messaging apps
- Autonomous, scheduled or triggered runs, and any usage outside the licensed, employee-facing Microsoft 365 boundary
- Computer use (CUA), and agent flows not triggered by “when an agent calls the flow” — these still consume credits even for Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users
The decision line: if it’s internal and licensed and on a Microsoft 365 surface and within fair-use limits, you probably don’t need to buy credits. If any part of that sentence is false, budget for credits.
| Scenario | Credits needed? |
|---|---|
| Licensed employees using an internal HR agent inside Teams | No — zero-rated (fair-use) |
| That same agent opened to customers on your public website | Yes |
| Unlicensed staff using an internal agent | Yes |
| An autonomous or scheduled agent run — even for internal operations | Yes — autonomous agent actions consume credits |
How to estimate and control credit spend
Estimate it first (credit math only)
This is the credit side of the bill. For a full Copilot Studio build estimate — channels, connectors, licensing — use the Copilot Studio pricing guide.
Monthly credits ≈ users × interactions per user × credits per interaction then × $0.01 (pay-as-you-go) or compare against $200 / 25,000-credit packs.
Worked example (a paid scenario — say a customer-facing agent, or unlicensed users): 200 users × 20 interactions/month × ~8 credits each ≈ 32,000 credits/month. Three ways that lands:
- Pay-as-you-go: 32,000 × $0.01 = $320
- One prepaid pack + overage: $200 (25,000) + 7,000 × $0.01 = $270 (if you’ve enabled pay-as-you-go for overage)
- Two prepaid packs: $400 for 50,000 credits — headroom, but unused credits don’t carry over
(If those were licensed employees using the agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, much of this would be zero-rated.) Use Microsoft’s agent usage estimator to model your own mix.
Keep it predictable
Consumption billing is off by default — turning it on is also where you set the guardrails:
- Activate deliberately. A tenant admin enables credits in the Microsoft 365 admin centre (for Copilot Chat agents) or links an environment to an Azure subscription with a billing policy in the Power Platform admin centre (for Copilot Studio). That activation step is where you set the rules of the road.
- Use credit policies. You can run up to 10 Copilot credit policies per tenant, scoping which agents and services can spend, and (for Copilot Chat) running prepaid-only without Azure pay-as-you-go.
- Cap per agent. Admins can set monthly consumption limits on individual agents, plus alert emails as usage approaches a threshold.
- Monitor usage. For Copilot Studio, the Power Platform admin centre → Licensing → Copilot Studio view shows prepaid capacity, pay-as-you-go credits, consumption by product and environment, and billed versus non-billable credits. For Microsoft 365 pay-as-you-go, billing also surfaces in the Microsoft 365 admin centre and Azure Cost Management.
- Separate dev / test / production environments so experiments don’t draw down production capacity.
Prerequisites & adjacent costs
Before you switch on paid usage:
- Pay-as-you-go needs an Azure subscription — linked to a Power Platform environment via a billing policy.
- The “free” Copilot Studio user licence (for makers) requires your tenant to have a prepaid Copilot Credit pack in place first — so the licence is free, but running still consumes credits.
- Adjacent services bill separately. Premium connectors, Dataverse, Power Automate and any Azure resources your agent calls have their own charges, distinct from Copilot Credits.
Where to go next
- Microsoft Copilot Pricing & Tiers Explained — the hub: every Copilot plan on one page
- Proving Copilot ROI — The Field Guide — credits are the cost; this is how you prove the return, with the ROI Calculator
- Is Copilot Studio Free? Pricing & Credits Explained — what a Copilot Studio build actually costs
- Copilot Pro vs Microsoft 365 Copilot — personal vs work (the subscriptions, not the meter)
- Microsoft Build 2026 Recap — how Copilot Credits fit the wider 2026 agent shift
- Token Calculator — model the cost of AI usage
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Cost Management & Billing — how usage is billed and controlled: the admin Cost Management dashboard, spending policies, P3, and the P1/P2/P3 myth
- Copilot & GitHub Pre-Purchase Plans (P3) Explained — the four pre-purchase plans, and whether GitHub credits can pay for Cowork