Power BI Pricing 2026: Pro vs Premium Per User, Is It Free, and When Fabric Capacity Pays
Power BI Pro costs $14 per user a month and Premium Per User $24, both paid yearly, as of October 22, 2026. The free account cannot share reports, so every coworker who reads one needs a license. Here is the per-user math at 10, 25 and 100 people, the F64 capacity line (about $5,000 a month reserved) where readers stop needing Pro, and what Copilot really costs.
How much does Power BI cost? The short answer
As of October 22, 2026, Power BI Pro costs $14 per user a month and Power BI Premium Per User costs $24 per user a month, both paid yearly. There is a free account, but it cannot share reports: Microsoft's own plan card says to upgrade to Pro or Premium to share. A 25-person company where everyone views reports pays $350 a month on Pro. The capacity route that lets people view reports without a license starts at F64, which works out to about $5,000 a month even on a one-year reservation.
We read Microsoft's Power BI pricing page, the Microsoft Fabric pricing page and Microsoft's public Azure retail price list on October 22, 2026. The Fabric page loads its prices in the browser, so the capacity figures below come from the retail price list for the East US region; the bills are our arithmetic on those published rates.
Power BI plans compared
| Free account | Power BI Pro | Premium Per User | Power BI Embedded | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $14 per user a month, paid yearly | $24 per user a month, paid yearly | Variable (capacity) |
| Build reports in Power BI Desktop | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Publish and share reports | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Model size limit | Not listed | 1 GB | 100 GB | Varies |
| Scheduled refreshes per dataset | Not listed | 8 a day | 48 a day | 48 a day |
| Storage | Not listed | 10 GB per license | 100 TB | Varies |
| Advanced AI, dataflows, datamarts, XMLA read/write | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Power BI Desktop, the app where reports get built, is a free download on every plan. Microsoft notes that academic, government and nonprofit pricing exist, and that the marketing prices on the page can differ from the checkout price by country.
One line on the page does not add up, so check it before you buy: the footnote prices the add-on that steps an existing Pro (or Microsoft 365 E5) user up to Premium Per User at $14 a user a month, which on top of Pro's $14 would cost more than buying Premium Per User outright at $24.
Free calculator
What is manual work costing you?
Run the Manual-Work Tax Calculator — the annual cost of the data entry, invoicing, and reporting your team still does by hand.
Calculate my Manual-Work Tax →Free, no email required to run it.
Is Power BI free?
Partly. Power BI Desktop is free, and the free account (part of the Microsoft Fabric free account, no credit card) lets one person build reports. The limit is sharing: to publish a report to coworkers, both the person publishing and the people reading it need Pro or Premium Per User, unless the company buys a large Fabric capacity (below). For a solo owner who only wants to look at their own numbers, free is enough. For a team, it is a trial.
Per-user math at 10, 25 and 100 people
| People who build or view reports | Pro ($14) | Premium Per User ($24) |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | $140 a month ($1,680 a year) | $240 a month ($2,880 a year) |
| 25 | $350 a month ($4,200 a year) | $600 a month ($7,200 a year) |
| 100 | $1,400 a month ($16,800 a year) | $2,400 a month ($28,800 a year) |
The meter that matters is readers, not builders. A company usually has two or three people who build reports and everyone else who opens them, and on Pro every one of those readers is a $14 seat. That is why the field-crew or front-desk dashboard is where Power BI bills grow: the 20 people who glance at it once a day cost $280 a month between them.
The F64 line: when capacity beats seats
Microsoft sells Power BI capacity through Microsoft Fabric. Its Fabric FAQ is explicit: report publishers and consumers still need a Pro license on Fabric capacity, except that from F64 (the Premium P1 equivalent) and up, report consumers no longer need one. Below F64, capacity adds compute; it does not remove seats.
Fabric is billed per capacity unit (CU). Microsoft's retail price list for East US shows Fabric capacity at $0.18 per CU-hour pay-as-you-go, and a one-year reservation at $938 per CU per year, which matches the Fabric page's "save about 41%" note. Over a 730-hour month:
| Fabric SKU | Pay-as-you-go a month | One-year reservation a month | Viewers still need Pro? |
|---|---|---|---|
| F2 (2 CU) | $262.80 | $156.33 | Yes |
| F64 (64 CU) | $8,409.60 | $5,002.67 | No |
The break-even is simple division. A reserved F64 costs $60,032 a year; Pro costs $168 a year per reader. F64 only pays for itself once more than about 357 people read reports. Almost no small or mid-sized business is near that line, so for them the answer is Pro seats, every time.
What Copilot in Power BI costs
On the Power BI plan table, the "Copilot in Fabric" and "Access to Fabric workloads" rows carry no check under Free, Pro, Premium Per User or Embedded. Copilot runs on Fabric capacity: the retail price list meters "Copilot and AI" usage on a capacity at the same $0.18 per CU-hour. So the honest budget for Copilot is a Fabric capacity on top of the Pro seats, and the smallest one, F2, is $156 to $263 a month before anyone has asked it a question. Microsoft does not publish how many CU-hours a Copilot question uses, so pilot it on pay-as-you-go before reserving.
The limits that break automated dashboards
- 8 refreshes a day on Pro. A scheduled dataset on Pro updates at most every three hours or so across a working day. A dispatch board, a call-volume dashboard or anything owners check "right now" will show stale numbers. Premium Per User raises it to 48 a day.
- 1 GB models on Pro. A few years of job, invoice and call records from several systems can pass that, at which point the model has to be trimmed or moved to Premium Per User's 100 GB.
- Every reader is a seat. The only way out below F64 is not to put people in Power BI at all: send them the number by email, Slack or text instead.
- Getting data in is your job. Power BI reads from your systems; connecting a field-service app, a phone system and accounting software, cleaning the data and keeping the connections alive is the work the license does not include.
Power BI vs Tableau on price
For a small team, Power BI is the cheaper license by a wide margin. Tableau Cloud charges by role, $75 for a Creator, $42 for an Explorer and $15 for a Viewer a month on its Standard edition (annual contract), so the same 25-person company with 2 builders, 3 editors and 20 viewers pays $576 a month on Tableau against $350 on Power BI Pro. Our Tableau pricing breakdown runs that comparison at 100 people and on Tableau Enterprise. The rest of the field, including Looker and Metabase, is in our best AI dashboard tools guide.
Is Power BI Pro worth it?
For a company already on Microsoft 365 with one person who likes building reports, yes: $14 a seat is the cheapest serious BI license on the market. It stops being the cheap option when the readers outnumber the builders ten to one, when the data needs refreshing more than every few hours, or when the hard part is not the chart but pulling numbers out of five systems that do not talk to each other. Our guide to AI dashboards and automated reporting walks through when a BI tool is the right layer and when it is not.
Who can build Power BI dashboards and reporting for you?
If your data already lives in Excel, SharePoint or Dynamics, someone on the team can build good Power BI reports with Desktop and a Pro license. Bring in a builder when the data has to come from systems Power BI does not reach cleanly, when owners want the number pushed to them instead of opening a report, or when an AI step should explain what changed. SuperDupr, Justin McKelvey's company, builds AI dashboards and automated reporting, published at $8,000 to $20,000, live in 2 to 4 weeks for most AI systems, with $200 to $2,000 a month in ongoing costs depending on volume, and the business owns what we build. We do not resell Power BI licenses, and we will tell you when Pro seats are the cheaper answer. For how build prices compare across shops, see our AI automation pricing guide. The first step is a free 30-minute strategy session.
Sources
- Microsoft Power BI pricing, microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/products/power-bi/pricing, read October 22, 2026: Free account (included in the Microsoft Fabric free account, no credit card, upgrade to Pro or Premium to share), Power BI Pro $14 and Premium Per User $24 per user a month paid yearly, Power BI Embedded variable; plan table (publishing, advanced AI, dataflows, datamarts, XMLA, model size 1 GB / 100 GB, refreshes 8 / 48 a day, storage 10 GB per license / 100 TB, Copilot in Fabric and Fabric workloads rows); footnotes on the step-up add-on, the Pro requirement on P and F SKUs, consumption without per-user licenses at P1 / F64 and above, Power BI Desktop as a free download, and the marketing-price disclaimer.
- Microsoft Fabric pricing, azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/microsoft-fabric, read October 22, 2026: SKU list F2 to F8192 by capacity units, reservation saving of about 41%, capacity overage, FAQ on Pro licenses for publishers and consumers and the F64 exception. Dollar figures on this page render in the browser only.
- Azure Retail Prices API, prices.azure.com, service "Microsoft Fabric", region East US, USD, read October 22, 2026: Fabric Capacity $0.18 per CU-hour pay-as-you-go (Power BI and "Copilot and AI" capacity usage meters at the same rate), one-year reservation $938 per CU, three-year $2,814 per CU.
- Tableau figures ($75 / $42 / $15 Standard): buy.tableau.com, read October 22, 2026, as used in our Tableau pricing breakdown.
- Worked examples: SuperDupr's arithmetic on the published prices above, over a 730-hour month, for assumed teams of 10, 25 and 100 people.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
As of October 22, 2026, Microsoft lists Power BI Pro at $14 per user a month and Power BI Premium Per User at $24 per user a month, both paid yearly. Power BI Embedded is priced by capacity. The free account and Power BI Desktop cost nothing, but sharing reports requires Pro or Premium. Microsoft notes the final price is shown at checkout and can vary by country.
-
Partly. Power BI Desktop is a free download and the free account (part of the Microsoft Fabric free account, no credit card) lets one person build reports. To publish and share reports, the publisher and each reader need Pro or Premium Per User, unless the company runs a Fabric capacity of F64 or larger, where report consumers no longer need a Pro license.
-
Pro ($14) covers publishing and sharing with a 1 GB model limit, 8 scheduled refreshes a day and 10 GB of storage per license. Premium Per User ($24) adds 100 GB models, 48 refreshes a day, 100 TB of storage, and advanced AI, dataflows, datamarts and XMLA read/write.
-
Microsoft's Azure retail price list (East US, read October 22, 2026) shows Fabric capacity at $0.18 per capacity-unit hour pay-as-you-go, or $938 per capacity unit for a one-year reservation. Over a 730-hour month, F2 is about $263 pay-as-you-go or $156 reserved, and F64 about $8,410 or $5,003. Below F64, readers still need Pro licenses.
-
Not on its own. Microsoft's Power BI plan table does not check Copilot in Fabric under Free, Pro, Premium Per User or Embedded. Copilot runs on Fabric capacity, metered as Copilot and AI usage at $0.18 per capacity-unit hour pay-as-you-go in East US, so budget a capacity on top of Pro seats.
-
SuperDupr, Justin McKelvey's company, builds AI dashboards and automated reporting that pull data from a business's own systems, published at $8,000 to $20,000 with $200 to $2,000 a month in ongoing costs. Most go live in 2 to 4 weeks. SuperDupr does not resell Power BI licenses.