Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Standard: What You Pay Extra, and Why

Here are the prices listed by Microsoft France on 26 October 2026, in euros excluding VAT per user per month, with annual commitment and annual payment: Business Basic at €6.07, Business Standard at €12.13 and Business Premium at €19.06. Each plan is also available without Teams, in line with European rules: €4.67, €9.34 and €16.28. With a monthly subscription, prices rise by about 20%: €7.28, €14.56 and €22.87. The gap between Standard and Premium is therefore €6.93 per user per month on an annual commitment. Each plan is capped at 300 users. Microsoft revised its prices on 1 July 2026 and existing customers keep their rate until renewal: check the price in your own contract before comparing.

Business Standard provides the installable Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook), Exchange email with a 100 GB mailbox that Microsoft is rolling out gradually and 50 GB of archiving, 1 TB of OneDrive storage per user, SharePoint, and Teams in the edition that includes it. On the security side, it includes multi-factor authentication and email filtering. It is a very good productivity plan, but not a security plan: nothing in it manages your computers or monitors devices beyond the Windows antivirus.

According to Microsoft's comparison, Premium adds the following to Standard: Intune Plan 1, to manage and secure computers and mobile devices; Defender for Business, which protects devices and detects attacks; Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, against malicious links and attachments; Entra ID P1, which makes access conditional on the user, the device or the sign-in location; Purview data protection, with sensitivity labels and data loss prevention for emails and files; and finally email archiving increased to 1.5 TB. Buying these tools separately would cost more than the €6.93 gap, and above all you would have to make them work together.

Premium becomes the right choice as soon as your staff work away from the office on laptops, you handle sensitive data (health, finance, large volumes of personal data), or an insurer, a large corporate customer or the NIS 2 directive asks you for evidence of security. In these situations, Premium's features often replace an antivirus and a device management tool bought separately. To find out whether NIS 2 applies to you, see our dedicated article, and for our overall approach, our Microsoft 365 cybersecurity page.

Nothing requires you to give everyone the same licence: Business plans can be combined in the same tenant, up to 300 users per plan. A common setup puts mobile staff and exposed roles (management, accounting, sales) on Premium, and everyone else on Standard or Basic. You still need to know who uses what: our article on unused licences shows how to check. If you are considering Copilot, its prices are set out in our Copilot article. And to review your own tenant, our free 15-minute audit starts right there.