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If you renewed your Microsoft Enterprise Agreement in 2024 and you plan to renew the same way in 2027, you will pay more for exactly the same estate, and you will not find out why until the invoice arrives. That is not a forecast, it is arithmetic, and it comes from three changes Microsoft made in about twelve months. I am Tom, Claire is with me on the numbers, and this is the Microsoft EA Renewal 2027 Series from Redress Compliance. Twelve short briefings for people who already hold an EA and want to walk into that renewal knowing what changed, what it costs them, and what to do about it.
Change one, and it is the big one. On 1 November 2025 Microsoft removed the automatic price level discounts, Levels A through D, for Online Services bought under an Enterprise Agreement. Those levels were your volume discount, applied silently because of your size. They are gone, and pricing now aligns to the public list on Microsoft dot com.
If you sat at Level B, that is roughly a six percent reset. Level C, about nine. Level D, up to twelve. Nothing about your estate changed.
Nobody negotiated anything away. The floor simply moved, and at renewal the quote starts from the new floor rather than the old one.
Change two arrived on the first of July 2026, and it landed on top of the first. The suite prices rose: Microsoft 365 E3 from thirty six dollars to thirty nine, E5 from fifty seven to sixty, and the frontline tier F3 from eight to ten. Alongside that, double digit increases on a set of products most enterprises hold without thinking about them, including Power BI, Teams Phone, the CAL Suites and several server products. Notice the shape of it.
The discount reset raised what you pay against list, and then list itself moved. Two increases, in the same direction, inside a year, and neither of them required you to buy a single extra thing.
Now the multiplier, which is what turns two increases into a serious number. Unified Support is priced as a percentage of your Microsoft product spend, not as a fixed fee. So every dollar the first two changes added to your licence bill automatically adds to your support bill, and that is before Unified Support applies its own escalation, which has been running near nine percent a year. Put the three together on a representative ten million dollar agreement and the total annual cost reaches roughly twelve and a half million by the middle of 2026.
That is about twenty five percent, for the same users, the same workloads and the same software.
Change three is the one people miss, because it is about the contract rather than the price. New Enterprise Agreement enrolments closed in October 2024. From 1 November 2025, organisations of roughly two thousand four hundred users and below can no longer renew an EA at all and move to CSP or to the Microsoft Customer Agreement for Enterprise. And Microsoft has committed to EA renewals through 2027, without committing beyond that.
Read that carefully. The vehicle you have used for a decade is now something you should be actively choosing, with numbers, rather than something you assume will be there. Session three does exactly that.
So what does this mean practically? Three things. First, your internal budget number for the renewal is almost certainly too low, because it was built from a world with volume levels in it. Rebuild it before anyone asks you for one.
Second, the savings you need are unlikely to come from a discount, because the discount lever is exactly the one Microsoft just shortened. They come from the estate: the mix, the count, the tier, the support line, and the Azure commitment. Third, everything you want to change takes months of preparation, not weeks. Which brings us to the only question that matters today.
That question is when to start. Serious preparation for an agreement this size runs twelve to eighteen months, not the three to six most teams allow themselves. So if you renew at any point in 2027, you are already inside the window today, and the work should be running now. Here is the move from this briefing: find your EA anniversary date and your notice deadline, write them where your team can see them, and count backwards twelve months.
That date is when your renewal actually begins. Next session, Claire and I put the full price arithmetic on the table, line by line. See you there.
Redress Compliance works on contingency: our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. Nothing saved, nothing paid. Independent, buyer side only, never vendor funded. Want Redress to contact you? Reach out and we respond the same day.
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