Microsoft 365 prices went up on July 1: what your business gets for it

You probably haven't noticed anything on your bill yet. That's the catch: Microsoft raised prices on its Microsoft 365 Business plans on July 1, but existing customers keep their old price until renewal. So the increase arrives whenever your subscription rolls over — possibly this month, possibly next spring — as a quietly bigger invoice.

Here's what changed, what you're actually getting for the money, and the one question worth asking once the new features land.

The new prices

Per person, per month, in US dollars:

• Business Basic: $6 → $7 (up 16%)
• Business Standard: $12.50 → $14 (up 12%)
• Business Premium: unchanged at $22

For a 20-person office on Business Standard, that's $360 more a year. Not a crisis — but worth knowing before the renewal invoice lands on your bookkeeper's desk.

One detail worth noticing: Business Premium, the plan with the most security built in, didn't go up at all. The gap between Standard and Premium is now $8 per person. If you priced that upgrade a year ago and passed, the math has shifted a little.

What you're getting for it

This isn't only a price rise. Microsoft is adding features to the Business plans over the summer, and one of them genuinely matters for security.

Time-of-click link protection is coming to Business Basic and Business Standard. Here's why that's a real upgrade. Email scanners check links when a message arrives. Attackers know this, so a common trick is to send a link that's perfectly clean at delivery — then flip the destination to a fake login page an hour later, after it's already sitting in your inbox looking legitimate. Time-of-click protection re-checks the link at the moment someone actually clicks it, which is when it counts. Until now, this kind of protection was reserved for pricier plans.

All three Business plans also get 50GB more email storage — useful, if less exciting.

Microsoft says the rollout will be complete by August 1, with a 30-day heads-up posted in the Message Center first. If you've never heard of the Message Center, that's the point: it's an admin-only news feed inside Microsoft 365 that almost no small business ever reads. Features can arrive there without anyone in your company knowing.

Three things to do this week

1. Find your renewal date. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Billing, then Your products. That's when the new price hits you. Takes five minutes, and your bookkeeper will appreciate not being surprised.
2. Re-run the Premium question at renewal. If you're on Basic or Standard, the upgrade to Premium — which adds full phishing and malware protection, device management, and more — now costs $8 per person instead of $9.50 from Standard. Still real money, but a smaller step than it was.
3. In August, ask one question. Whoever manages your Microsoft 365 — an IT provider, or whoever set it up — ask them: "Is time-of-click link protection active for our users?" Included is not the same as switched on, and new features have a way of arriving half-configured.

That last point is the quiet theme here. Microsoft keeps adding protections to the plans you already pay for, but at a 20-person company it's nobody's job to notice. If you'd rather check than assume, Tenant Strike runs a read-only scan of your Microsoft 365 setup — it can see your settings but never change them — and grades it A–F with the exact fix for anything that's off, in under five minutes.

Either way: know your renewal date before the invoice does.