Buy Copilot Credits: capacity packs, pre-purchase plans and pay-as-you-go

Short answer: there are three ways to buy Copilot Credits and they are sold in two different portals. Prepaid capacity packs cost $200 for 25,000 credits a month and are bought in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Pay-as-you-go costs $0.01 a credit with no commitment and is enabled by linking an environment to an Azure subscription. The Copilot Credits pre-purchase plan is a one-year prepaid pool of Copilot Credit Commit Units bought in the Azure portal, and that pool is usable across eligible Microsoft products rather than being locked to Copilot Studio.

Last updated August 2026. Rates and purchasing routes read from Microsoft Learn on August 22, 2026. We sell a competing product, so check the arithmetic rather than trusting it.

How do I buy Copilot Credits?

Decide first whether you want a committed rate or no commitment, because that choice determines which portal you buy in. Prepaid capacity packs are a subscription and live in the Microsoft 365 admin center alongside your other Microsoft licenses. Pay-as-you-go and the pre-purchase plan are both Azure constructs and need an Azure subscription plus a billing policy created in the Power Platform admin center. Plenty of teams stall here because they go looking for credits in the wrong console.

The rates are not the same. A prepaid pack works out at $0.008 a credit. Pay-as-you-go is $0.01. That is a 25 percent premium for the flexibility of not forecasting, which is a fair trade when you genuinely cannot predict volume and a poor one once you can.

What is a Copilot Credit capacity pack?

A capacity pack is a monthly subscription containing 25,000 Copilot Credits for $200. Packs stack, so buying four gives you 100,000 credits a month for $800. The credits are pooled at the tenant, and an admin then allocates them down to individual environments from the Licensing section of the Power Platform admin center. That pooling is useful: one team's underuse covers another team's spike without anyone raising a purchase order.

The constraint to plan around is that capacity is enforced monthly and unused Copilot Credits do not carry over. Buy five packs, draw 90,000 credits, and the remaining 35,000 are gone at the end of the billing month. Because packs only come in 25,000-credit units, most tenants are better off buying slightly fewer packs than their estimate and attaching a pay-as-you-go meter to absorb whatever spills over, rather than buying a spare pack that expires unused.

What is the Copilot Credits pre-purchase plan?

The pre-purchase plan, which Microsoft calls Copilot Credit P3, is a one-year pay-upfront option bought in the Azure portal. You buy a pool of credits, agents draw them down automatically, and if you exhaust the pool you can either buy more or fall back to pay-as-you-go billing. Unused credits expire at the end of the annual term rather than rolling forward, so the commitment is real.

What makes P3 worth understanding is that Microsoft publishes the discount ladder, which almost nobody quotes. From the Copilot Credits Guide dated August 2026, the nine tiers run as follows.

Microsoft publishes the tier volumes and the discount percentages but not a base rate for P3, so the two right-hand columns apply each discount to the only published Copilot Credit price, the $0.01 pay-as-you-go rate. Treat them as arithmetic rather than as a quote, and confirm the base with your account team before you commit.

On that basis one number stands out. You have to commit to 300 million credits, roughly $2.4 million a year, before the deepest P3 tier reaches $0.008 a credit. That is the same rate a $200 prepaid capacity pack gives any customer off the shelf. Unless your volume is genuinely enormous, the pack is the better published rate, and P3 is really buying you a tenant-wide, multi-product credit pool with a single annual commitment rather than a meaningful unit discount.

The pool is the actual reason to consider it. Copilot Credits are pooled at the tenant and span Copilot Studio agents, Copilot Cowork, Work IQ APIs and the AI features in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. If you are funding several of those in the same year, one committed pool beats managing separate meters. Like pay-as-you-go, P3 needs a billing policy in the Power Platform admin center tying your environments to the Azure subscription, or the environments will carry on drawing from packs regardless of what you bought.

Can you buy Copilot Credits without a subscription?

Yes, through pay-as-you-go. You link an environment to an Azure subscription with a billing policy, and at the end of each month your organization pays only for the credits its agents actually consumed. There is no license commitment and no upfront purchase, and you can unlink the environment at any time, after which usage is no longer billed. For a pilot, or for a seasonal customer-facing agent, this is usually the right starting point.

Do you have to buy credits before you can use Copilot Studio?

For the standalone route, yes, and this catches people out. Microsoft lists the Copilot Studio user license as free of charge, then attaches a note stating that you need a Copilot Studio tenant prepaid Copilot Credit pack subscription before you can get that user license. The seat costs nothing and the prerequisite costs $200 a month, so the practical entry price for a tenant on this route is one pack, not zero. Every other Copilot seat has a published figure attached, and we list them together on our Copilot license cost page.

There are ways around it. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license also grants access to build agents, and there is a free trial license that lets an individual sign up, create agents and test them in the test chat panel. The trial's limit is deliberate and worth knowing before you plan an evaluation around it: you cannot publish an agent on a trial license. Admins can also block self-signup from the Microsoft Admin Center, which is why some evaluators find the trial simply unavailable in their tenant.

Copilot Credits are not the only Microsoft credit

Three different Microsoft currencies get called credits, and buying the wrong one is an easy mistake because the search results blur them together. Copilot Credits are the Copilot Studio and agent currency described on this page, sold at $200 per 25,000. AI Builder credits are the older Power Platform currency for AI model capacity. GitHub Copilot premium requests are a separate allowance in a separate product for developers, billed and purchased through GitHub, and have nothing to do with Copilot Studio agents.

Microsoft also renamed the Copilot Studio currency from messages to Copilot Credits on September 1, 2025. Documentation and third-party articles written before that date describe message packs, and Microsoft confirmed there was no change to the quantity per prepaid pack or to the pay-as-you-go rate at the rename. If you are reading a comparison that still counts messages, the arithmetic is probably still valid even though the vocabulary is not.

What happens if you buy too few Copilot Credits?

Microsoft allows some overage as a grace period so that a shortfall does not immediately halt business processes, and it quantifies that grace period: enforcement is triggered when a tenant reaches 125 percent of its prepaid capacity, at which point custom agents are disabled. Past that, any experience requiring credits stops working. The half people plan for is that end users find agents stop responding to requests. The half almost nobody plans for is that makers also lose the ability to author with natural language, to preview and test agents, and to generate agent evaluations, so your build team goes down at the same moment your agents do.

Agent flows fail in their own way: when prepaid capacity is exhausted, enforcement blocks new runs rather than disabling the agent. If a customer-facing agent going quiet costs you money, plan the detection as well as the capacity, because the first signal is usually a customer complaint rather than a dashboard alert unless you have an uptime monitor checking the endpoint from outside your tenant. When you do hit the wall, the three ways out are to reallocate unused capacity from elsewhere in the tenant, buy more packs, or attach a pay-as-you-go meter to absorb the overage.

Worth noting where that 125 percent lives, because it is easy to look in the wrong place. It is not on the short enforcement policy page. It is in the Overage enforcement section of Microsoft's billing rates and management article, last updated on August 3, 2026, which states that enforcement is triggered when a tenant reaches 125 percent of prepaid capacity and then works through a four-environment example to show how the threshold is applied to tenant-level rather than allocated capacity. Budget against your purchased capacity anyway: the 25 percent is a cushion against a bad week, not headroom to plan into.

How many Copilot Credits should you buy?

Count the meters your agents actually trip, then round up to whole packs. A classic answer is 1 credit, a generative answer is 2, an agent action is 5, tenant graph grounding is 10, content processing is 8 a page, and voice runs 10, 35 or 75 credits a minute by tier. A support interaction with one grounded generative answer and two agent actions draws 22 credits, so about 18 cents prepaid. Multiply by monthly volume, divide by 25,000, round up, multiply by $200. Our Copilot Studio credits calculator runs that whole chain including the pack rounding.

Before you commit to a number, subtract the traffic that will not bill. Microsoft lists the agent meters as no charge when the person using the agent holds a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and the scenario is employee facing under that authenticated identity, subject to fair usage limits. An internal agent in a fully licensed tenant can need very little purchased capacity. The same agent facing customers bills every answer, every action and every grounded lookup, which is why pilots that go external produce bills nobody forecast.

The other line to check before ordering is model choice. Prompt tools bill at 0.1, 1.5 or 10 credits per thousand tokens depending on whether they are basic, standard or premium, which is $0.80, $12 or $80 per million tokens at the prepaid rate. That hundredfold spread is a configuration setting, not a volume problem, and it will dominate your credit consumption if premium reasoning is switched on at scale.

Is buying credits the right shape at all?

Consumption pricing charges you most in the months the tool works hardest, which is uncomfortable when usage tracks a backlog rather than revenue. If Microsoft 365 is your system of record and your identity and approvals already run through it, Copilot Studio is the natural fit and the credit math is just something to manage. If what you actually want is a fixed line in the budget for research, lead lists, outreach drafts, inbox triage, data entry and recurring reports, a flat-rate agent removes the forecasting problem entirely. Ours is $149 a month for the whole account, and we built this page, so weigh that accordingly.

If the license question is still open rather than the credit question, start with do you need a Copilot Studio license. For the full rate card and the per-unit dollar figures, read Copilot Studio pricing, and if credits as a concept are the confusing part, what AI credits are covers how the currency works across vendors.