Nerdio Manager for MSP
Microsoft is increasing prices on Microsoft 365 licenses on July 1, 2026. Packaging changes started rolling out in June, and the full rollout completes August 1. If you haven't started talking to your clients about it yet, there's still time... but not much.
The SKU breakdown
For Business licenses, the increases aren't catastrophic, and they only apply to Business Basic and Business Standard, while Business Premium holds at $22.00. However, for a 50-user client on Business Standard, that's still an extra $900 a year. Not the kind of number that makes or breaks a relationship, but real enough that if it shows up on an invoice without context, it turns into a "why are we paying more?" call.
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SKU | Current price | New price (July 1) | % change |
|---|---|---|---|
Microsoft 365 Business Basic | $6/user/month | $7/user/month | +16% |
Microsoft 365 Business Standard | $12.50/user/month | $14/user/month | +12% |
Microsoft 365 Business Premium | $22/user/month | $22/user/month | 0% |
Source: Microsoft, Microsoft 365 pricing and packaging updates, February 16, 2026.
The goal is to get ahead of that conversation—and, if you frame it right, use it to open a different one that's long overdue.
What's bundled in
Alongside the price changes, Microsoft is adding capabilities across all three Business SKUs:
- +50 GB Exchange Online storage: Mailbox storage doubles from 50 GB to 100 GB per user.
- URL time-of-click protection: Links in emails are checked at click time, not just at delivery (already included in Business Premium).
- Copilot Chat enhancements: Gain inbox and calendar awareness, plus access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint agents.
The mailbox storage increase will matter to clients who've been running into limits, and the Copilot additions will move the needle on productivity for clients already leaning into Microsoft 365.
One clarification worth having ready, however, is that the Intune and Defender additions you may have seen covered elsewhere apply to Enterprise SKUs (E3/E5), not Business. For Basic and Standard clients, the honest message is that you're getting useful additions, but this is still primarily a price increase.
That last point is worth sitting with because "we're paying more and not getting that much more" is an opening to a conversation that's easier to have now than it has ever been.
The Business Premium play
Before July 1, the gap between Business Standard and Business Premium was $9.50 per user per month. After July 1, it's $8.00. For clients who looked at that delta in the past and decided it wasn't worth it, the math is worth revisiting.
At $14.00, Business Standard seems to make sense for SMB clients—the price is manageable, the apps are familiar, and it feels like a complete Microsoft setup. The issue is that Business Standard looks more complete than it is. Business Standard was designed to provide productivity apps—Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, email protection, MFA support—but the security tooling SMBs need to actually protect their environments isn't included.
Business Premium, on the other hand, adds Intune, Defender for Business, Microsoft Entra ID P1, Conditional Access, and Defender for Microsoft 365 Plan 1 all in a single license for $22.00 per user per month.
What's more, if you were to add the same security capabilities to a Business Standard deployment as standalone add-ons, you're looking at $35 per user per month. The bolt-on route actually costs $13 more per user per month for a less complete stack.
For a 50-user client, Business Premium runs $4,800 more than the Standard SKU. But that difference buys the security and compliance infrastructure that, in the event of an incident, would cost far more to respond to than to prevent.
Why fragmented tooling makes your job harder, too
There's a second argument for Business Premium beyond cost and risk, and it's about how the tools actually work.
The security capabilities in Business Premium were built to work together. The identity signals that Entra ID P1 evaluates feed into Conditional Access, which checks Intune's device compliance state, which informs Defender for Business. A device that falls out of compliance gets blocked from accessing company resources automatically. A risky sign-in triggers a step-up authentication requirement without anyone having to notice it first. The tooling does the work because the pieces are connected.
When you purchase those same tools separately, you don't get that integration, you get individual capabilities running in parallel. The tools don't talk to each other, so your team has to. More manual processes, more cross-referencing between platforms, more places for policy drift to quietly exist without anyone catching it.
That's an operational problem for any MSP, and it compounds across every tenant you're managing.
Delivering M365 without overhead
There's a second argument for Business Premium beyond cost and risk, and it's about how the tools actually work.
The security capabilities in Business Premium were built to work together. The identity signals that Entra ID P1 evaluates feed into Conditional Access, which checks Intune's device compliance state, which informs Defender for Business. A device that falls out of compliance gets blocked from accessing company resources automatically. A risky sign-in triggers a step-up authentication requirement without anyone having to notice it first. The tooling does the work because the pieces are connected.
When you purchase those same tools separately, you don't get that integration, you get individual capabilities running in parallel. The tools don't talk to each other, so your team has to. More manual processes, more cross-referencing between platforms, more places for policy drift to quietly exist without anyone catching it.
That's an operational problem for any MSP, and it compounds across every tenant you're managing.
Download the Business Standard vs. Business Premium infosheet
Nerdio Manager for MSP manages Business Premium capabilities—including Intune policy deployment, Conditional Access, and Defender endpoint management—across all your client tenants without logging into each one separately. If you're thinking about moving clients up to Business Premium at scale, that's where Nerdio fits in.
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