Microsoft 365 business prices went up today, 1 July 2026, and cold-email mailboxes feel it most

Today, 1 July 2026, Microsoft new commercial list prices for Microsoft 365 take effect. Microsoft announced the update on 4 December 2025, so the date is not a surprise, but it is the day the higher number starts applying to new purchases. If you run a business on these plans, or you buy inboxes to send cold email, the figure you budgeted with is now out of date.

What changed

The increase lands on the two most common small-business plans. Using Microsoft published list prices on annual billing:

• Business Basic rose from 6 to 7 dollars per user a month, an increase of about 17 percent.
• Business Standard rose from 12.50 to 14 dollars per user a month, an increase of about 12 percent.

These are the first list-price increases on these plans since they were introduced. The change is part of a broader packaging and pricing update Microsoft applied across select commercial suites, including Enterprise, Frontline and Government equivalents, not only the Business tier.

What you get for the extra

Microsoft paired the rise with added value rather than a bare price bump. Business Basic and Business Standard both gain 50 GB of extra mailbox storage, URL time-of-click protection in Outlook, and Copilot Chat enhancements such as inbox and calendar awareness plus access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint agents. Whether that is worth the increase depends entirely on whether you use those features; for a mailbox that exists only to send, most of it goes unused.

The catch worth knowing: existing tenants wait until renewal

The new price applies to new purchases from 1 July 2026. If you already run Microsoft 365, you keep your current price until your next renewal, so an organisation that renewed in June has up to a year before the increase reaches its invoice. That also means there was a window to lock in the old rate by renewing early, which is now closed for anyone who did not take it. Check your renewal date to know when the higher number actually hits your bill.

The calculation it quietly moves: cold-email mailboxes

There is one place this increase changes a number people rarely budget for. Cold outreach does not run on a single inbox: to spread volume and protect your main domain, most setups buy a handful of secondary domains and put several mailboxes on each, then send slowly from all of them. Every one of those sending seats is a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailbox, and the cold-email platforms that advertise unlimited mailboxes price the software, not the inboxes themselves.

So the mailbox line is often the bigger half of a cold-email bill, and it just moved. A ten-inbox Microsoft 365 setup on Business Basic went from about 60 to about 70 dollars a month at the new rate, before the outreach software on top. The AI and storage additions do nothing for a mailbox that only sends, so for this use the change is a straight cost rise. Price the inboxes at today rates before you assume the platform plan is the expensive part.

If you are standing up sending mailboxes now, our free cold-email deliverability tool generates the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records each new domain needs, so the inboxes you are paying more for actually reach the inbox. Our guide on why cold email lands in spam walks the authentication setup, and the Instantly vs Smartlead vs Lemlist breakdown shows where the mailbox cost sits next to the software.