On December 4, 2025, Microsoft announced its first broad commercial price-and-packaging update in years, and the new list prices take effect on July 1, 2026. They land on most business and enterprise plans: Office 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E3 and E5, the Business suites, Frontline plans, and several standalone components. Depending on the plan, the increase runs from zero to roughly 43 percent, with most business tiers in the 8 to 16 percent band (Microsoft Licensing).
If you run a one-person business and you live in Outlook, Excel, and a shared OneDrive, this reaches your bill, and the window is short. Today is June 23, 2026. You have about a week before the new pricing turns on. The useful part: existing customers keep their current rate until the next renewal after July 1, and you can renew or upgrade before then to hold today's price for another term. The rest of this is what to check, what to ignore, and how to decide by Friday.
What Microsoft actually announced
Microsoft published the update on December 4, 2025, and the new list prices take effect July 1, 2026, with packaging changes rolling out from June. It is the company's first broad commercial price reset in years, and it reframes most suites with added security, management, and Copilot Chat features meant to justify the higher tag (Microsoft 365 Blog).
The additions are real, not a sticker bump. Business plans gain 50GB of extra mailbox storage and URL time-of-click protection. Office 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E3 pick up Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, with that rollout finishing by August 1, 2026. E3 and E5 add Intune management features like Remote Help and Advanced Analytics. Whether a solo operator uses any of it is the real question, and the answer is usually no.