What Are Your Unused Microsoft Licences Costing You?

A Microsoft licence is paid per person per month. As long as someone occupies it, it is useful. The day that person leaves the company, changes role or stops using the tool, the line stays on the invoice. Nothing flags it: it causes no outage, no alert, no complaint. It behaves exactly like a forgotten subscription on a bank account.

The first is the unprocessed departure: the account is disabled but the licence is never released, so the subscription runs on. The second is the oversized licence: someone holds a full licence while only using email and video calls. The third is the duplicate: you pay an external tool for e-signature, file sharing or video conferencing when the same function is already included in what you pay Microsoft.

Two places are enough, and your company's administrator access covers both. In the Microsoft 365 admin centre, Billing then Licences shows how many licences you pay for and how many are actually assigned. The gap between the two is money sitting idle. Then the usage reports show, service by service and person by person, who really uses what over the last 30, 90 or 180 days. Someone active on email and nowhere else probably does not need the most complete licence.

The arithmetic is simple and you need nobody to do it for you. Based on Microsoft's public list prices as of 26 October 2026 (excluding VAT, with Teams, annual commitment), a Business Standard licence at €12.13 a month left in place on ten unused accounts comes to €1,455.60 a year. An E3 licence at €37.78 a month in the same situation costs €4,533.60 a year. These are not theoretical savings: it is a budget line you can remove without degrading the service to a single person.

This check does not need to be a project. It fits into a thirty-minute meeting, twice a year, between whoever tracks the licences and whoever knows the staff movements. The best moment for the first one is two months before your contract anniversary date, because, on an annual subscription bought directly from Microsoft, licences can only be removed within a short window after purchase or renewal (seven days for an MCA billing account). The reduction is therefore prepared before the due date and scheduled for the renewal. Past that window, you are committed for another year on a volume you did not choose.