Is Copilot Free? (2026): Which of the Five Copilots Costs Nothing, Which Costs $21 to $30 a Seat, and Which One Your Business Actually Wants

Is Copilot free? Two of the five are

As of September 2026: the consumer Microsoft Copilot in Windows, Edge, Bing, and the Copilot app is free, and GitHub Copilot has a free tier. The Copilot most people are actually asking about, Microsoft 365 Copilot inside Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams with your company's files, is a paid add-on at $30 per user per month on enterprise plans and, as reported by 2026 licensing guides, $21 per user on the small-business plans with an $18 first-year promotional rate on annual plans bought by December 31, 2026. The question has five answers because Microsoft put one word on five products, and the free one is the one with no access to your work. Here is the map, then the trap, then what to buy.

A sourcing note: Microsoft's and GitHub's pricing pages render only in the browser, so the enterprise $30 figure and the GitHub $10 / $19 / $39 ladder are the ones on my Claude for Microsoft 365 and Copilot vs Claude pages, and Copilot Pro's retirement is as reported by licensing guides and marked that way. The Business-plan price and the promotion are confirmed on Microsoft's own Copilot Business page (read September 12, 2026): $21 per user a month on an annual plan, $25.20 paid monthly, and $18 for the first year on an annual plan bought between July 1 and December 31, 2026, for existing Microsoft 365 Business customers. Confirm the digits on Microsoft's page before you sign a tenant up.

The five Copilots and what each costs

• Microsoft Copilot (consumer). The assistant in Windows, Edge, Bing, and the Copilot app. Free. Web-grounded chat, images, no access to your work files, not covered by any business agreement.
• Copilot Pro. The old $20-a-month consumer upgrade that put Copilot inside the consumer Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. As reported, closed to new customers on October 1, 2025 and folded into Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 a month, with existing subscriptions running until August 2026. If a page tells you Copilot Pro is $20 a month, it is a 2025 page.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. The web-grounded chat included with Microsoft 365 business subscriptions at no extra license, inside the work apps but without the deep access to your mail and files. This is the "free Copilot" a business already has.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot (the add-on). The one that reads your tenant's mail, files, and meetings inside Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams. $30 per user per month on enterprise plans; as reported, $21 per user on Business Standard and Business Premium in 2026, with an $18 first-year promotional rate on annual plans bought by December 31, 2026. This is the Copilot the upgrade button is selling.
• GitHub Copilot. The coding assistant. Free tier at $0 with capped completions and chat; Pro $10 a month; Pro+ $39; a reported Max tier at $100; Business $19 and Enterprise $39 per user per month. Since June 2026, as reported, the paid tiers meter usage in AI Credits rather than counting premium requests.

Copilot Studio, the agent builder, is a sixth product priced for enterprises and metered; a small business will not meet it until it is building agents on the Microsoft stack.

What the free Copilot can and cannot do

The free consumer Copilot is a capable web assistant: it answers questions with search grounding, drafts text, makes images, and lives one keystroke away on a Windows machine. What it cannot do is the thing a business wants: it does not see your mailbox, your SharePoint, your Teams chats, or the spreadsheet you have open, and nothing you type into it is covered by your organization's Microsoft 365 terms. Treat it the way you would treat a personal ChatGPT or Claude account, which is the same rule I give every owner on is Claude AI free: fine for the general question, never for the client file. The "free Copilot" a business has is Copilot Chat inside the work apps, which is grounded on the web rather than on your tenant; the moment you want it reading your own documents, you are buying the add-on.

Microsoft 365 Copilot: the $21 to $30 seat, and what it buys

The add-on puts the assistant inside the apps your people already live in, with your tenant's data behind it: summarize the thread in Outlook, draft the deck from the doc, recap the Teams meeting, ask Excel what changed. For a Microsoft-native office that is the pitch, and it is a real one. The cost as of 2026 is $30 per user per month on enterprise plans (E3, E5, and the like) and $21 on the Business Standard and Business Premium plans ($25.20 if you pay month to month), on top of the Microsoft 365 subscription you already pay. A ten-person company on Business Standard adds $210 a month for it, or $180 a month in the first year on the $18 promotional annual rate, which Microsoft offers on plans bought by December 31, 2026. The comparison that matters is not against the free Copilot, which is a different product; it is against a $20 Claude Team seat that also works inside Microsoft 365, which is the next section.

Part of the Outlook story is already free: Copilot Chat in Outlook comes with every eligible Microsoft 365 business plan. The summary at the top of a thread, drafting in the compose box, and priority triage are the parts tied to the paid license. Which is which is in Copilot for Outlook.

Is Copilot or Claude the better buy for a small business?

On list price, Claude: Team is $20 per seat billed annually ($25 monthly) for 2 to 150 people, includes Cowork, and its terms say your data is not used for training by default. Microsoft 365 Copilot is $21 to $30 a seat on top of Microsoft 365. The Copilot advantage is not the dollar; it is that it lives inside Outlook, Word, Excel, and Teams with your tenant's permissions already applied, and for an office where everything is Microsoft that is worth a few dollars a seat. Claude closes most of that gap through its Microsoft 365 connector, which is the subject of Claude for Microsoft 365, and the head-to-head on features, data terms, and price is on Copilot vs Claude for business. My working rule as of 2026: a company that is Microsoft-native end to end and already on an enterprise plan should try the Copilot add-on for the people who live in Outlook and Teams; everyone else should put Claude Team in front of the people who write and build, and let the free Copilot Chat handle the general questions.

Is GitHub Copilot free?

There is a free tier, and for a lot of people it is enough. GitHub Copilot Free costs nothing and caps completions and chat; Pro at $10 a month removes the caps for one developer, Pro+ at $39 adds the premium models and a larger allowance (a $100 Max tier has been reported), and the team plans are Business at $19 and Enterprise at $39 per user per month. As reported, GitHub moved the paid tiers to token-based AI Credits in June 2026, so the allowance is now measured in credits rather than premium requests. The comparison a developer actually wants is against a terminal agent, and that is on GitHub Copilot vs Claude Code: Copilot is the autocomplete-and-chat layer in the editor at $10 to $19, Claude Code is the agent that works across the whole codebase, and most senior developers run both.

The trap: paying $0 for the wrong Copilot

The failure I see in owner-led companies is not paying too much for Copilot. It is a team that uses the free consumer Copilot for real work because it was on the laptop, pastes client material into a product with no business agreement behind it, and never buys the seat that would have protected them. The second failure is the opposite: an owner who buys the $30 add-on for everyone and finds that the six people who do not live in Outlook never open it. Buy the paid seat for the people whose day is the mailbox and the deck, put a workspace plan with no-training terms in front of the people who write and build, and tell everyone else which Copilot is the free one and what it is for.

The business-owner answer

Is Copilot free? The one on your laptop, yes; the one your business wants, no, and it should not be, because the paid seat is what puts your tenant's terms between your files and the model. Decide by office, not by price tag: Microsoft-native and enterprise-licensed, try the add-on for the Outlook-and-Teams people; anyone else, a $20 Claude Team seat for the writers and builders plus the free Copilot Chat for the rest. If you want the whole thing set up rather than adjudicated, the Claude for Small Business install configures the workspace, the Microsoft 365 connector, and the first three workflows in about two weeks, from $4,500; the $397 Playbook is the do-it-yourself version.