On Friday, October 2, 2026, Microsoft added roadmap item 571400 to the Microsoft 365 roadmap. The title is short: Access to UBB models via the model selector. UBB means usage-based billing. The target for general availability is October 2026.
In plain words: the model picker in Copilot Chat will soon list models that are not covered by the Copilot licence. Each prompt on one of those models costs money. An admin has to hand out credits first, and when a user runs out, they have to ask for more.
I opened Copilot > Cost management in my test tenant on Monday to see what an admin would set up. Before you click anything, the panel already has three settings filled in. There’s no limit for the policy and no limit per user. Alerts are off.
Microsoft 365 admin center · Copilot · Cost management
If you see Get started, usage-based billing is still off in your tenant and nothing is being billed.
Two kinds of model, two ways of paying
Most people I talk to think the Copilot licence covers every model in the picker. It covers most of them, and this change is about the few it leaves out.
Microsoft now sorts Copilot work into two buckets, and each one is paid for in its own way.
| Covered by the licence | Pay per use | |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft’s name | User subscription licence (USL) | Usage-based billing (UBB) |
| What it covers | Everyday work: Chat, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, meeting recaps | Advanced work: Cowork, Code, newer frontier models |
| How you pay | Fixed price per user | Copilot Credits, per use |
| Who pays | IT, usually | Whoever owns the spending policy |
| Off by default? | No | Yes |
The table hides two details that catch people out.
First, the same model can sit in both buckets. MC1483844 went out on September 30, 2026. It says GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Sonnet 5.5 are billed per use in Cowork and Copilot Studio. In Chat, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the same two models come with the licence, with usage limits.
Second, pay-per-use still needs a licence. Microsoft’s Learn page is plain about it: UBB experiences “consume Copilot Credits and require a USL for access.” You buy credits on top of the licence, never instead of it. SharePoint agents spend the same Copilot Credits, and the post on SharePoint agents without Copilot licences covers that side of the bill.
What a prompt costs
Microsoft has not published a credit rate for the pay-per-use models in the Chat picker. I looked in the roadmap item, Message Center, the Learn pages and the October 2026 Copilot Credits Guide. None of them has a per-prompt price for Chat.
What it has published is still enough to build a rough budget.
The unit price. The Copilot Credits Guide lists pay-as-you-go at $0.01 per Copilot Credit. That is in US dollars and billed to an Azure subscription. Prepaid capacity packs give 25,000 credits a month, and a pre-purchase plan gives larger discounts.
Cowork tasks. The same guide gives rough credit counts for Cowork, the closest thing to a heavy Chat prompt that has a price on it:
| Task size | Example from the guide | Credits | At $0.01 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light | A weekly status update from your calendar | 100 to 300 | $1 to $3 |
| Medium | A meeting brief with a doc, a spreadsheet and slides | 300 to 700 | $3 to $7 |
| Heavy | Six months of usage data turned into a report | more than 700 | over $7 |
Microsoft calls these “rough planning estimates.” I’d treat them as that.
Reasoning models in Copilot Studio. Copilot Studio bills a reasoning model at 10 credits per 1,000 tokens, on top of the normal fee for the answer. A generative answer is 2 credits. So a long reasoning answer of about 4,000 tokens costs 2 credits plus 40 credits, or 42 cents.
That last number is my own estimate. Microsoft hasn’t published one. It uses the Copilot Studio rate because it’s the only published per-token rate for a premium model. The Chat rate could be higher or lower. When Microsoft publishes it, I’ll update this post.
Put together, a quick question on a premium model is likely to cost cents. A long research-style task can cost dollars. A person who runs a dozen heavy tasks a day can spend more in a month than their licence costs, so I’d spend my time on the cap rather than on guessing the price.
Who controls the credits
Spending is managed in one place: Copilot > Cost management in the Microsoft 365 admin center. Roles decide who can do what.
| Role | What it can do |
|---|---|
| Global administrator, Billing administrator | Turn on usage-based billing, create policies, pick the billing method |
| AI administrator, License administrator | Edit existing policies, limits and alerts. Can’t create policies |
| AI Reader, Global Reader | View spending reports only |
Give your finance contact AI Reader. They can watch the spending without being able to change it.
A spending policy has five parts. It has a scope (all users, or chosen security groups) and a list of services it covers. It has a monthly limit for the whole policy and an optional limit per user. The last part is alerts.
A spending policy sets a ceiling on what a group can spend. It doesn’t hand anyone a pot of credits. Microsoft says this directly: policies “don’t reserve or allocate Copilot Credits to users or groups.” The credits come from your billing method, and the policy decides how much of it a group can burn.
What happens when a user runs out
When a user hits their per-user cap, or the policy hits its monthly cap, the user loses access to those services for the rest of the month. Credits reset on the first of the month. There is no automatic top-up.
The user can ask for more. Requests land in Credit requests in Cost management, where an admin approves or declines them. MC1470425 added custom request policies in September, so you can send requests to a manager or a finance approver instead of IT. For now, that routing applies to Cowork requests and “future supported service requests.”
A few rules are worth knowing before someone tests them:
- Hitting a limit doesn’t move a user to another policy. If someone is in two policies, they get the one with the highest per-user limit. When they hit it, they stay on it.
- Moving groups doesn’t reset spending. Learn’s example: a user spends 500 credits under one policy, then moves to another group. The 500 credits still count against the new policy’s limit.
- Deleting a policy doesn’t refund anything. Used credits stay used.
How to cap spend before general availability
This is the part to do this month, before the models land in the picker. It takes about 20 minutes once you know your numbers.
- Pick a pilot group. Make a security group of the people who actually need frontier models. Twenty-five people is a sensible start for a 200-person organisation.
- Pick a per-user cap. Something like 2,000 credits a month ($20). That covers a few heavy tasks a week.
- Work out the policy cap. Users times the per-user cap. For 25 people at 2,000 credits, that’s 50,000 credits, or $500 a month at most.
- Open Copilot > Cost management and select Get started. The panel Activate the default spending policy for your organization opens.
- Change both limits. Under Set the monthly spending limit for this policy, choose Limit monthly spending and enter your policy cap. Under Select monthly budget limits for users, choose Limit monthly spending per user and enter your per-user cap.
- Turn on Define alerts. Pick a threshold, 75 percent is a good start, and add whoever owns the budget.
- Select Customize setup configuration before you activate. Change the scope from All users to your pilot group, and review the services list.
- Select Activate.
Cost management · Activate the default spending policy
Both limits start on No limit. Set them before you select Activate.
Cost management · Define alerts
Alerts start switched off. Without them, the first sign of heavy use is the Azure invoice.
If you’d rather not allow pay-per-use models at all yet, do nothing. Usage-based billing stays off until someone activates it, and Microsoft’s own page says pay-as-you-go billing “is disabled” by default. That’s a fine choice. Just write it down, so the next admin knows it was on purpose.
What this does not fix
A cap limits the damage. Several things are still open after you set one.
- You still don’t know the Chat price. Until Microsoft publishes a rate for the pay-per-use models in the picker, any budget is an estimate. Watch Message Center for the post that goes with roadmap item 571400, and check the Credits Guide each month.
- Activation needs an Azure subscription. In my tenant the Activate button stayed greyed out. The panel said no Azure subscription “could be confirmed” and asked for an Owner or Contributor role on one. A Global administrator can create a subscription from the panel. Plan for that step, because it often needs someone outside IT.
- The admin center may look a little different for you. I opened Cost management in two sessions on the same day and got two versions of the page. The settings were the same, but some wording on the page was not. Go by the setting names and expect the text around them to drift.
- Caps don’t judge value. A cap stops overspending. It can’t tell a $5 task that saved an afternoon from one that saved nothing. Look at the Consumption reports after the first month and adjust the caps per group.
- Oversharing is a separate problem. A pricier model reads the same files a cheaper one does. If Copilot can see things it shouldn’t, that is a permissions job, and the HR folder post covers it.
The bottom line
Before you select Activate, set a per-user cap, a policy cap and an alert, and scope the first policy to a pilot group. Nothing is billed until you do.