Copilot Pricing in 2026: GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot

GitHub Copilot Free: who it actually fits

The GitHub Copilot Free tier in 2026 is the right way to evaluate Copilot before you pay. You get two thousand code completions per month and fifty chat messages per month, with limited access to GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6. Chat and completions work inside Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and on GitHub.com. The cap is the friction point: any working developer will burn through two thousand completions inside a single feature branch. If you are a student, a teacher, or a maintainer of a popular open source project, you qualify for the full Pro plan free of charge through GitHub Education or the maintainer program.

GitHub Copilot Pro at ten dollars per month: the default for individual developers

Pro at ten dollars per month (or one hundred dollars annually) is the version most paid users settle on. You get unlimited code completions, unlimited chat, the full model menu including Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5, code review hints, pull request summaries, and Copilot in the CLI. The single biggest reason to upgrade is removing the cap on completions. The annual price saves twenty dollars per year. For anyone who codes daily, this is the right tier.

GitHub Copilot Pro+ at thirty-nine dollars per month: when the premium pool matters

Pro+ at thirty-nine dollars per month sits in a different category from Pro. The headline benefit is a much larger pool of premium model usage, fifteen hundred premium requests per month, longer agent runs, and priority access to new models as they ship. Pro+ pays off if you are running Claude Opus 4.6 or the highest reasoning tiers many times a day, or if you rely on Copilot agents to drive multi-step changes across a repo. For most working developers, Pro does the job and Pro+ is overkill.

GitHub Copilot Business at nineteen dollars per user per month: the team baseline

Business at nineteen dollars per user per month is what most engineering orgs settle on. You get everything in Pro plus organization admin, policy management, audit logs, SAML SSO through GitHub Enterprise Cloud, IP indemnity for suggested code, and content exclusions to block sensitive paths from being used as context. For any company that wants Copilot rolled out at a team level with controls and indemnity, Business is the right tier.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise at thirty-nine dollars per user per month: when codebase grounding earns its price

Enterprise at thirty-nine dollars per user per month adds chat grounded in your private repositories, fine-tuned models on your code, knowledge bases, advanced security features, automated pull request review, and the Copilot Workspace agent for repo-wide changes. The Business to Enterprise jump is roughly double the price for a real but narrow benefit: Copilot that knows your code, your conventions, and your internal docs. We see Enterprise pay off in larger engineering orgs where the cost of onboarding new engineers to a sprawling codebase is the bigger expense.

Microsoft 365 Copilot at thirty dollars per user per month: the office work tier

Microsoft 365 Copilot at thirty dollars per user per month, billed annually, is a separate product line from GitHub Copilot. It lives inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and Loop, and it is grounded in your Microsoft 365 tenant graph (your emails, files, chats, and meetings). You must have a qualifying Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise license to add it. For knowledge workers who spend most of their day inside Outlook and Excel, the Outlook draft triage and the Excel data analysis flows are the two features that justify the price.

Microsoft 365 Premium at 19.99 dollars per month: the consumer version that replaced Copilot Pro

Microsoft 365 Premium at 19.99 dollars per month is the consumer cousin of Microsoft 365 Copilot. It replaced Copilot Pro, which Microsoft retired in late 2025, and existing Copilot Pro subscribers keep access until 1 August 2026. It works for people on a personal or family Microsoft 365 subscription and gives you Copilot inside the desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote, plus priority access to the newest models in the consumer Copilot app and faster image generation with Designer. If you do not have a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription, the Copilot in apps experience does not unlock and you only get the chat features.

Sales Copilot, Service Copilot, and Copilot Studio: the specialized tiers

Sales Copilot and Service Copilot are role-specific add-ons at fifty dollars per user per month, aimed at sellers in Dynamics 365 Sales or agents in Dynamics 365 Customer Service. They connect to your CRM (including Salesforce for Sales Copilot), draft customer emails, summarize opportunities, and surface meeting prep inside Outlook and Teams. Copilot Studio is the low-code platform for building custom Copilots and agents, starting at two hundred dollars per month for twenty-five thousand messages on a pay-as-you-go basis.

What we actually pay for

Across our editorial team, every working engineer is on GitHub Copilot Pro at ten dollars per month, and one of our researchers added Pro+ to get a bigger premium request pool. None of us pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot personally, but our parent business runs M365 Copilot at thirty dollars per user per month for the team that lives in Outlook and Excel. We have not yet built anything in Copilot Studio at the two hundred dollar tier. The pattern we see most often is GitHub Copilot Business at nineteen dollars per seat plus Microsoft 365 Copilot at thirty dollars per seat for the same employee, which lands at forty-nine dollars per user per month combined.

The verdict: which Copilot tier should you pick

Here is how I think about it. For an individual developer, GitHub Copilot Pro at ten dollars per month is the right answer almost every time. I would not bother with Free for daily work because the caps bite within hours. If you are a student, a teacher, or an open source maintainer, claim your free Pro license. For an engineering team that wants indemnity and admin, GitHub Copilot Business at nineteen dollars per seat is the baseline I would buy. Enterprise at thirty-nine dollars per seat is worth it once your codebase is large enough that grounding pays back.

On the Microsoft 365 side, my recommendation depends on what license you already hold. If you have a personal or family Microsoft 365 subscription, Microsoft 365 Premium at 19.99 dollars per month is the right tier and it earns its price in Outlook and Excel within a few weeks. If you are running a business on Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot at thirty dollars per user per month is the right tier and the place I would pilot first is Outlook draft triage. Sales Copilot, Service Copilot, and Copilot Studio are specialized buys for teams that fit their specific job, and I would only add them after the base license is proving its value. Verified May 2026.