Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Microsoft will send you a renewal quote. What Microsoft will not send you is the page showing how that quote was built out of four separate increases that landed at different times, in different places, on different parts of your bill. So we are going to build that page ourselves. I am Daniel, Claire has the arithmetic, and by the end of this briefing you will be able to calculate your own 2027 number from your current invoice, before anybody quotes anything at you.
That number is the single most useful thing you can own going into this renewal, because every conversation afterwards is measured against it.
Layer one is the discount level reset from 1 November 2025. Work out which level you were on, because most people know it only vaguely. Level A was the entry band, and the levels rose with your seat count, applying a bigger automatic discount as you got bigger. With Levels A through D removed for Online Services, your Online Services now price against public list.
For a former Level B customer that is about a six percent increase, Level C about nine, and Level D up to twelve. So take your current Online Services spend, find your old level, and add that percentage. Two details matter: on premises software is not affected, and Education and US Government price lists are excluded.
Layer two, from the first of July 2026, is that list itself moving. Microsoft 365 E3 went from thirty six to thirty nine dollars per user per month. E5 from fifty seven to sixty. The frontline F3 from eight to ten.
Take those percentages seriously in the F tier especially: eight to ten is a twenty five percent increase on the licence most organisations deploy in the largest volumes, because that is the shop floor, the warehouse, the retail estate, the hospital ward. A change that looks small per seat is not small at forty thousand seats, and it lands in exactly the population most enterprises have never modelled carefully.
Layer three is the product level increases, and this is where estimates go wrong, because these are the lines nobody reviews. Double digit rises landed across select Power BI, Teams Phone, the CAL Suites and a range of server products. Those sit in the middle of most enterprise agreements, they were bought years ago, and they renew on autopilot. So go line by line through the enrolment rather than modelling the suites alone.
In our experience the suites are the number everybody checks and the middle of the agreement is where the surprise actually lives, because nobody owns those lines internally and nobody has questioned them for three years.
Layer four is not an increase at all. It is a multiplier, and it is why this cycle stings more than the numbers suggest. Unified Support is priced as a percentage of your Microsoft product spend. So the moment layers one, two and three raise your licence bill, your support bill rises with it, automatically, with no negotiation, no notification and no new capability delivered.
On top of that, Unified Support has been escalating around nine percent a year in its own right. If you take one structural insight from this series, take this one: under a percentage support model, every licence increase you accept is charged to you twice.
Put the four layers together on a representative ten million dollar Enterprise Agreement and the total annual cost reaches roughly twelve and a half million by the middle of 2026. About twenty five percent, for an estate that did not grow, on software that did not change. Now the important part: that is the do nothing number. It is what you pay by renewing exactly what you hold today.
It is not a negotiation outcome and it is not a worst case. It is the baseline, and the entire remaining series is about the difference between that number and what you actually end up signing.
The move from this briefing: take your current annual Microsoft invoice and build one page with four rows. Discount level reset. Suite increases. Product level increases.
Support recalculated on the new total. Put your own numbers in it this week, and take it to your finance lead before Microsoft ever presents a renewal figure, because a CFO who learns the number from you is an ally and a CFO who learns it from a vendor quote is a problem. Next session: whether the EA is even the right vehicle for you in 2027. 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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