If your Microsoft 365 renewal has landed anytime since July, you’ve probably already noticed the invoice looks different. Microsoft’s global price adjustment took effect on 01/07/2026, and it wasn’t a flat increase across the board: Business Basic rose by roughly 15-17%, Business Standard by around 10-12%, while Business Premium barely moved at all.

Microsoft’s stated reasoning is that the base subscriptions now include more built in, additional security controls, device management, and AI-related capability, so the price reflects a platform that’s grown since these tiers were first priced. Whether or not that lands as good value depends entirely on whether your business is actually using any of it.

What actually changed:

Roughly, based on current UK list pricing:

• Business Basic: up around 15-17%
• Business Standard: up around 10-12%
• Business Premium: effectively unchanged
• Enterprise E3/E5: up 5-8%
• Frontline F1/F3: up 25-33%, the steepest rise of any tier

The practical effect: the gap between Standard and Premium has narrowed considerably. For a lot of small businesses, Premium (which adds Intune device management, Microsoft Entra P1 features, and advanced threat protection) is now a much smaller jump in cost for a meaningfully bigger jump in capability than it was before July.

Why this is worth a proper look now

If your renewal already went through at the new pricing, it’s easy to assume there’s nothing to be done. In practice there are two things worth checking on any Microsoft 365 estate:

1. Licence audit: it’s common to find accounts still licensed for people who’ve left, or users sitting on Premium when Basic would do (or vice versa, now that the pricing gap has shrunk). Every unused or mismatched seat is now costing more than it was in June.
2. Plan fit: with Premium and Standard now closer in price, it’s worth recalculating whether consolidating onto a single tier, rather than running a mixed estate, actually works out cheaper once the security features you’re paying for elsewhere (a separate MDM tool, say) are accounted for.

What we’d recommend doing

1. Pull a current seat count and cross-reference against your active starter/leaver list, this alone often recovers cost.
2. Get an up-to-date, like-for-like price comparison between Standard and Premium for your actual user count, the maths has changed since July.
3. If you’re on annual commitment, check your renewal date and get the comparison done well before it’s due, not after.