Is Copilot free? What you get for nothing, and what it costs a UK business

The short version

• Free for anyone: Microsoft Copilot on the web, in its app, in Windows and in Edge. You don’t even have to sign in.
• Free with a business plan: Copilot Chat, for anyone signed in with a work account on Business Basic, Standard or Premium, and some other plans. It answers from the web and from files you upload, and it includes Copilot in Outlook.
• Paid: Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, the add-on that works with your emails, meetings, chats and files, with Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams. £16.10 a user a month paid yearly, £13.80 on an offer that ends on 31 December 2026, or £19.32 paid monthly, all before VAT.
• At home: Copilot comes with Microsoft 365 Personal (£8.49 a month), Family (£10.49) and Premium (£18.99), for the subscription owner only, with usage limits.
• Nothing is unlimited, and Microsoft describes its limits in words, not numbers.
• The regulator’s research: among organisations with 10 or more staff, the free version was common and the paid one was "deemed expensive by many". Smaller firms weren’t interviewed.
• What to do: use the free Copilot Chat on real work first. If you pay, start with one licence.

Is Copilot free? Three Copilots, three answers

"Copilot" is the name on several different things, and the answer depends on which one you mean.

Microsoft’s own explainer describes the free one this way: "This version of Copilot is available free of cost and is ideal for general questions and answers, people trying AI for the first time, and web-based tasks." It adds: "Sign in isn't required, but signing in with your personal account gives you access to chat history, image creation, longer conversations, voice interactions, and other Copilot features."

If you use Copilot for work, use the version that comes with your work account rather than the free personal one. Microsoft lists "enterprise data protection" among what business users get, and it’s the version your business’s settings apply to.

There is one more Copilot to rule out. GitHub Copilot, the one people ask about in code editors, is a separate product for software developers. It has its own free plan, which GitHub says "includes limited access to a selection of Copilot features".

Is Copilot free with Microsoft 365 for business?

The chat part is. Microsoft’s eligibility page says: "Microsoft Copilot Chat is available at no extra cost for eligible users who sign in with a Microsoft Entra work or school account and have a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription." An Entra account is the work login that comes with your Microsoft 365 plan.

The qualifying plans a small business is most likely to have are Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium, and Teams Essentials. Microsoft’s pricing page puts it this way: "Copilot Chat is a web-grounded AI assistant available, at no additional cost, with eligible Microsoft 365 plans. It also includes Copilot in Outlook and the Microsoft Copilot app."

One thing we noticed. Microsoft 365 Apps for Business isn’t on the Copilot Chat eligibility list, but it is on the list of plans you can add the paid Copilot licence to. If that’s your plan, check with Microsoft or whoever looks after your IT before assuming you have Copilot Chat.

What the free Copilot Chat does and doesn’t do, from Microsoft’s comparison of Copilot Chat with and without a licence, in its words:

The label is how you find out what you have. Microsoft says to sign in at copilot.cloud.microsoft and look under your name, where one of three labels appears: Copilot Chat (Basic), M365 Copilot (Basic) or M365 Copilot (Premium).

In plain terms, the free Copilot Chat is a capable chatbot inside your work account, but it only knows about your business what you paste or upload into it. The paid licence is what lets it find last month’s quote in your inbox, recap a Teams meeting or draft from your own files.

How much does Copilot cost in the UK?

These are Microsoft’s UK prices for businesses on 16 October 2026, per user per month. The pricing page notes against each: "Price does not include VAT."

The £13.80 is an offer with conditions. "This discount offer is available between July 1, 2026, and December 31, 2026." It is "available only to existing Microsoft 365 customers with an eligible Business plan", and "An annual commitment is required, and promotional pricing applies to the first year only." Microsoft adds: "Customers have a 7-day cancellation window to receive a prorated refund."

Two things the table doesn’t say, from our own arithmetic:

• Paying monthly costs exactly 20% more than paying yearly, on all three plans: £16.10 becomes £19.32, £18.10 becomes £21.72 and £24.60 becomes £29.52. That is also the VAT rate, which makes the two easy to confuse. £16.10 plus VAT is £19.32 too, but £19.32 is the monthly price before VAT.
• A year for one person on the add-on, before VAT, is £193.20 paid yearly at the normal price, £165.60 on the offer, or £231.84 paid monthly. For a team of five at the normal yearly price, it’s £966.

We can’t tell you whether a "with Copilot" plan works out cheaper than the add-on, because that depends on what the plans cost without Copilot. Microsoft’s page listing those blocked our requests, so we haven’t quoted it. Check both before choosing.

For home, Microsoft’s individual plans page listed Microsoft 365 Personal at £8.49 a month (£84.99 a year), Family at £10.49 (£104.99), Premium at £18.99 (£189.99) and Pro at £94.99 a month, monthly billing only. Copilot in the apps is for the person who owns the subscription: "AI benefits are only available to the subscription owner and cannot be shared with others."

Is free Copilot unlimited?

No version is, and Microsoft describes its limits in words rather than numbers. Its table for the home plans gives chat "Extensive usage" on every plan, and voice, vision and image creation "Standard usage" on Personal and Family. It adds: "Limits may vary based on the feature, entry point, and system conditions. Limits may also change over time as new AI models become available."

The paid home plans promise "higher usage than free", so the free version has lower limits, but we didn’t find them stated anywhere. For business, the free Copilot Chat gets standard access, which Microsoft says "may be limited during peak times"; the paid licence gets priority.

What organisations told the competition regulator

On 16 October 2026 the Competition and Markets Authority proposed to designate Microsoft with "strategic market status" in business software. That is a status under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and if Microsoft is designated the CMA could then consider rules on how it competes. The press release says Microsoft’s business software "is used by over a million businesses and public sector organisations across the UK, with around 20 million monthly users".

Copilot is part of it. One of the areas in the CMA’s roadmap is whether rival AI tools "can integrate with, work alongside and be discovered and accessed from Microsoft’s Business Software Ecosystem". The CMA also says: "SMS designation does not assume wrongdoing." Comments are open until 5pm on 13 November 2026, and "The CMA will take a final decision by 13 February 2027." Nothing changes for your Microsoft account yet.

Alongside the proposal, the CMA published research by Jigsaw Research: 80 hour-long online interviews with people who make software decisions for their organisations, carried out in June and July 2026. On AI assistants it found:

• "Copilot Chat, the free version of Copilot, was commonly used by our sample, as it was felt to be easy to access within the user interface (UI) for those already using the Microsoft ecosystem."
• "Some were using paid versions, often buying a few licences and running pilots."
• Copilot was seen as integrated and secure, but often described as “good” or “good enough” rather than leading.
• "The paid version of Copilot was also deemed expensive by many."
• "Some said they were blocking AI assistants other than Copilot to help reduce risk and prevent data loss."

Read it for what it is. The interviews were with organisations with "10 or more employees, spending at least £7,500 a year on Microsoft business software", and the report says it "cannot describe the views of decision-makers in organisations that do not use Microsoft, spend below the £7,500 per year on Microsoft or have fewer than 10 employees". It’s qualitative, so there are no percentages: the findings are "indicative of the market rather than representative".

So it tells you what larger organisations did, not what a five-person firm should do. But they faced the same choice a small business does: the free version is already there, and the paid one is a monthly bill per person.

Copilot vs ChatGPT: what the interviewees said

The same research is the nearest thing we have to an independent UK answer on Copilot vs ChatGPT, and it isn’t a test. Interviewees saw Copilot as having "the benefits of being integrated and secure", with "Claude and ChatGPT seen as better for coding and more advanced tasks (e.g. creative and visual design)".

Some had a data reason to stay with Microsoft: "Some partners or clients mandated that data had to be stored in the EU, and these AI competitors were reported to store data in the US." That is what interviewees reported, not something the researchers checked; the report says it "was not part of the research objectives to fact-check". We haven’t tested the tools against each other either.

Should you pay for Copilot?

Copilot has one thing going for it that a lot of AI sold to businesses doesn’t: a published price. When we looked at what AI costs a small business, the guides gave confident figures and no sources. A published price makes the decision simpler. In order:

1. Check what you already have. Sign in at copilot.cloud.microsoft with your work account and look at the label under your name. On Business Basic, Standard or Premium you should have Copilot Chat already.
2. Use the free version on real work for a couple of weeks. Draft replies, summarise a long document you upload, tidy up a quote. Note the jobs where you kept copying things in from your inbox or your files. Those are what the paid licence does.
3. If you pay, start with one person: the one whose day is spent in Outlook, Word, Excel or Teams meetings. The licence is per user, so you don’t need one for everyone. It’s also what the organisations in the CMA’s research did: "often buying a few licences and running pilots".
4. Mind the commitment. The £13.80 offer needs a year’s commitment and applies to the first year only. After that the normal price applies, which was £16.10 on the day we checked.
5. Check where your data is allowed to go. If a customer contract says their data stays in the UK or the EU, check that before you use any AI assistant on their work, Microsoft’s or anyone else’s.

What argues the other way

• "Free" assumes a plan. Copilot Chat costs nothing extra only because you already pay for an eligible Microsoft 365 plan.
• The free version may be all you need. If most of your AI use is drafting and summarising text you paste in, the licence adds little. The case for paying is work that lives in your inbox, meetings and files.
• Prices and plans move quickly. The offer ends on 31 December 2026, and Microsoft says its limits "may also change over time as new AI models become available". Check the live page before you buy.
• The research isn’t about small firms. It’s the best independent account we have of how organisations use Copilot, but it covers organisations with 10 or more staff only.
• We have an interest. Lola Squared builds AI agents for businesses, and the AI that wrote this isn’t Microsoft’s. We don’t sell Microsoft licences or earn anything from any plan named here.

Sources, and what we checked

• Microsoft: Copilot plans and pricing for business and for individuals (UK pages); the support pages What’s the difference between Microsoft Copilot (free) and Copilot in Microsoft 365, How Copilot Chat works with and without a Microsoft Copilot license and AI credits and limits; and on Microsoft Learn, the Copilot Chat overview, Copilot Chat eligibility and License options for Microsoft Copilot.
• GitHub: Plans for GitHub Copilot.
• Competition and Markets Authority: the press release and proposed decision consultation (both 16 October 2026), the case page, the roadmap of possible interventions, and Jigsaw Research’s Qualitative Research on Microsoft Business Software (final report, September 2026; interviews June and July 2026).
• Every page above was read on 16 October 2026 and again on 18 October 2026, the morning we published. Microsoft’s two pricing pages were read twice on 16 October, about seven hours apart, and a third time on 18 October, and the prices matched each time. The only change we found on 18 October was that the business pricing page now labels Copilot Business “(add-on)”, as this post already describes it. The GOV.UK pages were read through GOV.UK’s content API, and the CMA’s documents from the PDFs themselves.
• Microsoft’s page listing Microsoft 365 business plans without Copilot blocked our requests, so we haven’t quoted those prices.
• Our own arithmetic: the 20% difference between monthly and yearly billing, and the yearly totals.
• Every quotation above was tested automatically against the text of its source before publication.