Getting Copilot UK pricing straight in 2026 means untangling at least five different things Microsoft now calls Copilot, and the gap between the free chatbot and a paid business seat is wider than most buyers assume. Microsoft lists its consumer Microsoft 365 plans from £8.49 a month, a standalone business add-on at £13.80 per user a month on annual billing, and a Copilot Studio agent platform priced in credit packs that start at £153.80 a month. This guide walks through every tier in pounds, who each one suits, and where the catch sits, so you only pay for the Copilot you will actually use.
- Free Copilot in Windows, Edge and the web app costs nothing and needs no subscription, but carries lower usage limits.
- Consumer Copilot now rides on Microsoft 365 plans: Personal £8.49/month, Family £10.49/month, Premium £18.99/month.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot for business is £13.80 per user a month on annual commitment, or £19.32 paid monthly, both ex-VAT, capped at 300 users.
- A promotional discount on the business add-on runs through 30 June 2026, with the standard price taking over from 1 July 2026.
- Copilot Studio agents are billed by Copilot Credits: pre-purchase packs of 25,000 credits at £153.80 a pack a month, or pure pay-as-you-go.
The five things Microsoft now calls Copilot
The single biggest source of confusion is that “Copilot” is a brand, not a product. In 2026 it covers the free assistant baked into Windows and Edge, the consumer AI features inside Microsoft 365 subscriptions, the separate Microsoft 365 Copilot licence aimed at businesses, the Copilot Studio platform for building your own agents, and a growing set of role-specific Copilots such as the recently previewed health assistant. Each is priced differently, and a few are free. Before you reach for a card, it helps to read our explainer on what the Microsoft Copilot Health UK preview actually offers, because that kind of specialised Copilot sits on top of the tiers below rather than replacing them.
The practical takeaway is that most UK readers already have a usable Copilot at no cost, and the paid tiers buy higher limits, deeper Office integration and, for businesses, the ability to ground answers in your own files. The skill is matching the tier to the job rather than defaulting to the most expensive seat because it shares the Copilot name. If your main interest is drafting and editing text, our roundup of the best AI writing assistant in the UK is worth reading alongside this, because Copilot is only one of three serious options and is not always the cheapest.
What you get free in Windows, Edge and the web
The free tier is the one most people will meet first. Microsoft ships Copilot as a built-in feature of Windows 11, as a sidebar in the Edge browser, and as a standalone web and mobile app, none of which require a subscription. You can ask questions, summarise pages, draft text, generate images and hold a conversation without paying anything. For a large share of UK users, that is genuinely enough, and there is no shame in stopping here.
The catch is usage limits. Microsoft reserves “higher usage” of select Copilot features for paying subscribers, which in practice means the free tier can throttle you during busy periods or cap the number of advanced requests, such as image generation or use of the newest reasoning model, you can make in a day. The free Copilot also does not see your private OneDrive, SharePoint or work email, so it cannot answer questions grounded in your own documents.
If you are weighing Copilot against rivals, our piece on the best AI writing assistant UK comparison notes that the free tiers of Claude and ChatGPT impose similar daily ceilings, so the limit is an industry norm rather than a Microsoft penalty. For developers specifically, the pricing logic differs again, as our look at Claude Opus 4.8 UK pricing shows where rival model costs sit.
Consumer Copilot now lives inside Microsoft 365
Here is the change that trips people up in 2026: the old standalone “Copilot Pro” consumer subscription has been folded into Microsoft 365. The advanced consumer Copilot features now come bundled with the personal Microsoft 365 plans, so the way an individual buys “Copilot Pro” today is by subscribing to the right Microsoft 365 tier rather than a separate £19-a-month add-on.
Microsoft 365 Personal is £8.49 a month or £84.99 a year and includes Copilot at higher usage than the free tier for selected features, alongside the desktop Office apps and 1TB of OneDrive storage. Microsoft 365 Family is £10.49 a month or £104.99 a year, shares the apps and storage across up to six people, though Copilot access is reserved for the subscription owner. At the top, Microsoft 365 Premium is £18.99 a month or £189.99 a year and is the tier that carries “extensive usage” of Copilot plus exclusive access to the newest advanced features. These are consumer prices that include VAT, which matters when you compare them with the ex-VAT business figures later. For households already paying for cloud storage, our look at Google Health Premium UK pricing shows how Microsoft is not the only one bundling AI into an existing subscription to lift the headline value.
Our view is that Microsoft 365 Personal is the sweet spot for most individuals who want better Copilot limits: at £84.99 a year it costs less than a tenner a month, and you get the full Office suite and 1TB of storage regardless of how much you use the AI. Premium at £189.99 a year only makes sense if you specifically want the exclusive advanced Copilot features and will use them often enough to justify more than double the annual cost.
Microsoft 365 Copilot for business and the 1 July 2026 change
The business product is a different animal. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a per-user add-on that requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 business or enterprise licence underneath it. Microsoft prices it at £13.80 per user a month on an annual commitment, or £19.32 per user a month if you pay monthly, both exclusive of VAT, with a maximum of 300 users on the standard business route. That add-on grounds answers in your organisation’s own Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and SharePoint data, which is the feature the consumer tiers simply do not have.
The timing matters. The £13.80 figure reflects a promotional discount that Microsoft runs through 30 June 2026, with the standard pricing taking over from 1 July 2026. We covered the detail and the VAT maths separately in our report on how the Microsoft 365 Copilot UK price rises on 1 July 2026, and that is the post to read if you are budgeting a renewal or a new rollout around that date. The short version for this overview: a VAT-registered business reclaims the VAT, so the ex-VAT figure is the one that hits your cost line, and 300 seats at the monthly rate is a meaningful annual number once the discount lapses.
What does the business seat actually buy over the consumer tiers? Tenant-wide data grounding, enterprise data protection, admin controls, and Copilot inside the web versions of the Office apps your staff already use. For a sense of how that plays out in a real deployment, our analysis of Microsoft Copilot at Accenture is the closest thing to a large-scale UK-relevant case study, and it is honest about where the productivity gains showed up and where they did not.
Copilot Studio: paying to build your own agents
Copilot Studio is the tier most buyers can ignore, but it matters for the small number of UK firms that want to build custom agents rather than use the assistant Microsoft ships. It is a platform for creating agents connected to your business data, and it is billed by consumption rather than by seat. Microsoft prices it through Copilot Credits, with a pre-purchase route offering packs of 25,000 credits at £153.80 a pack a month and up to 20 per cent savings, or a pure pay-as-you-go meter where you pay only for the capacity you use at the end of the billing period.
The agents Studio produces reached general availability earlier in the year, and we explained what that milestone meant in our piece on how Microsoft Copilot Studio agents went generally available. For most SMEs, the honest answer is that Studio is overkill until you have a specific, repeatable workflow that the standard Microsoft 365 Copilot cannot handle, such as a customer-service agent grounded in a product database. The pay-as-you-go meter is the safer starting point because it removes the £153.80-a-month commitment while you test whether an agent earns its keep.
What is already bundled free in your devices and apps
Before paying for any tier, check what you already have. Copilot in Windows 11 and the Edge sidebar costs nothing. If you own a Copilot+ PC, the on-device features and the dedicated Copilot key are part of the hardware, not a separate subscription, which is one reason the category is worth understanding before you upgrade your laptop. Our guide to Microsoft Surface for Business sets out which models carry the Copilot+ silicon and which do not, because buying the chip is a one-off cost rather than a recurring AI fee.
The same logic applies to the keynote announcements. Plenty of the Copilot capability Microsoft demonstrates at events ships to the free tier or to existing Microsoft 365 subscribers over time, so the price you pay is often for early access and higher limits rather than for the feature itself. We tracked what the latest event meant for buyers in our coverage of the Microsoft Build 2026 keynote, and the pattern is consistent: wait a quarter and much of the headline functionality lands in tiers you may already own.
Plans compared at a glance
The table below lines up every tier with its UK price and the buyer it suits. Consumer prices include VAT; the business and Studio figures are quoted ex-VAT, as Microsoft lists them. Use it as a quick reference, then read the verdict for the call we would make.
| Tier | UK price | MTW read |
|---|---|---|
| Free Copilot (Windows, Edge, web) | £0 | Enough for most casual users; lower limits, no access to your files. |
| Microsoft 365 Personal | £8.49/month or £84.99/year (inc VAT) | Best value for individuals wanting higher Copilot limits plus Office. |
| Microsoft 365 Family | £10.49/month or £104.99/year (inc VAT) | Same apps for up to six people; Copilot for the owner only. |
| Microsoft 365 Premium | £18.99/month or £189.99/year (inc VAT) | Only worth it for the exclusive advanced Copilot features. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (business) | £13.80/user/month annual, £19.32 monthly (ex VAT) | The one that reads your work data; price rises from 1 July 2026. |
| Copilot Studio (agents) | £153.80 per 25,000-credit pack/month, or pay-as-you-go | Custom agents only; start on the metered plan, not the pack. |
What we like and what we would watch
| What we like | What we would watch |
|---|---|
| A genuinely capable free tier in Windows and Edge that most people can live on. | Usage limits on the free and consumer tiers are vague and can throttle heavy days. |
| Consumer Copilot bundled into Microsoft 365 Personal at £84.99 a year is strong value. | The business add-on standard price takes over from 1 July 2026, lifting renewal costs. |
| Copilot Studio offers a metered route so you do not commit to £153.80 a month to experiment. | The 300-user cap on the standard business route forces enterprises onto separate licensing. |
Our verdict
Most UK individuals should not pay for Copilot at all to start with: the free tier in Windows and Edge covers everyday questions, drafting and summaries. If you want higher limits and already use Office, Microsoft 365 Personal at £84.99 a year is the tier we would buy, because the storage and apps justify the cost even before the AI. Reserve Microsoft 365 Premium at £189.99 a year for people who will lean on the exclusive advanced features weekly. For SMEs, the £13.80 per user a month business add-on is the only tier that reads your own files, and it is the one to budget carefully around the 1 July 2026 price change; pilot a handful of seats before committing the team. Copilot Studio is for the minority building custom agents, and even then the pay-as-you-go meter beats the £153.80 pack until an agent proves it pays back. The risk that would flip our advice is a further consumer price rise: if Microsoft lifts the Personal tier, the free Copilot suddenly looks even smarter.
Copilot UK pricing: frequently asked questions
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