The price for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 are going up today

Microsoft is increasing their prices on virtually all of their software and services in 2022. Prices on Microsoft 365 and Office 365 have officially been increased effective March 1 2022.

Why is Microsoft raising the prices?

Microsoft says it is adjusting the prices to reflect the massive value and enhancements it has added to the Office 365/Microsoft 365 suites over the past 10 years and is committed to continue innovation going forward. Since 2011, Microsoft has added 25 applications and released over 1400 new capabilities to Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

First substantive update to the list price for:

Office 365 since first launched, June 2011
Microsoft 365 since first launched, March 2017

Since launch, Microsoft has added or introduced 19 applications

Teams
Access
Bookings
Delve
Forms
GroupMe
Kaizala
Lens
Lists
Loop (currently in preview)
OneDrive
OneNote Class Notebook
Planner
Power Platform
Publisher
SharePoint
Skype for Business
Staff Hub
Stream
Sway
To-Do
Visio
Whiteboard
Yammer

Since launch, Microsoft has developed and released over 1400 capabilities

Communication & Collaboration: Together Mode, Custom Backgrounds, Front Row, live captions with speaker attribution, group chat with up to 250 people, polls in Teams meetings, and virtual breakout rooms; Whiteboard; Lists; Planner; Shifts; Forms; real-time collaboration in Word, Excel, PowerPoint desktop apps; @mentions; assign tasks; modern comments; auto-save; expanded cloud storage
Security & Compliance: DLP for email and documents, sensitivity labels, and message encryption; Content Search, eDiscovery, and core Litigation Hold; MFA
AI & Assistance: Automatic video transcription & face detection in Stream; Acronyms in Word; Live captions & subtitles; Ideas in Word, Natural language query in Excel; Presenter Coach; Ideas in PowerPoint; Resume Assistant; Designer in PowerPoint; Editor in Word & Outlook; Researcher in Word; Translate

What is Affected

All new registrations and upgrades. will have to pay the new, increased price for Microsoft 36 and Office 365.

Other Changes

There's one more change to Microsoft subscriptions that especially business users should pay attention to... Microsoft is making annual agreements more strict and is increasing the prices on month-to-month subscriptions. This means that businesses that want the flexibility of increasing/decreasing their licensing on-demand will now pay more for month-to-month subscriptions.

What are the Increase Rates

What to Consider

If your business is using month-to-month subscriptions for Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Products today, it may be worth considering moving to an annual plan. If your business doesn’t plan to decrease licenses in the next year it may be worth the cost savings. Just remember, if you do decrease staff you may end-up paying for licenses you aren’t using which could negate any savings.