Microsoft is extending Copilot Chat throttling to unlicensed users, and admins can't see the limits
From 9 November 2026, Microsoft throttles more Copilot Chat features for unlicensed M365 users. Caps are secret and admins cannot change them.
If your organisation uses Microsoft 365 and hasn’t purchased the paid Copilot add-on, your staff are about to find that Copilot Chat does a little less than it used to. From 9 November 2026, Microsoft is extending “fair use” throttling to additional Copilot Chat features for commercial users who do not hold a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. Smaller organisations with 2,000 seats or fewer have already been subject to these expanded limits since 2 November 2026.
The complicating factor: Microsoft has not published what the limits actually are, and admins have no way to view or adjust them.
What is changing
Copilot Chat remains included in qualifying Microsoft 365 business and enterprise subscriptions. That is not changing. What is changing is how much unlicensed users can do with certain features before hitting a wall.
Microsoft already applied fair use throttling to some Copilot Chat capabilities, image generation being the most prominent example, under a previous message centre notice (MC1064749). This new rollout, communicated to admins via MC1536158 and MC1536163, extends that same approach to additional features. Microsoft has not specified which features are newly throttled, only that the scope is wider than before and may expand further as the product evolves.
When a user hits a limit, Copilot notifies them in-product and tells them when the feature will become available again. Any task already in progress will not be interrupted. The limits vary throughout the day, so a user who hits a cap in the morning might have access again by the afternoon.
What admins can and cannot do
This is the part that will frustrate IT teams. The limits cannot be viewed in the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre, and they cannot be adjusted. Microsoft describes reaching a limit as “expected behaviour” rather than an error condition, so there is no alert or report to monitor.
If a user reaches a limit, they can request a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence directly from within the Copilot interface. That request lands with an admin, who can approve or deny it through the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre. That in-product prompt is, in effect, the mechanism Microsoft has built for surfacing demand. The Partner Centre announcement for resellers is notably direct about this framing, describing the limits as something that “creates an upsell conversation with your customers.”
No admin action is required to implement these limits. They apply automatically.
Who is affected and who is not
The throttling applies to commercial Microsoft 365 users who do not hold a paid M365 Copilot add-on licence. It covers Copilot Chat across web, desktop, and mobile apps.
Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence are not affected. For licensed users, Microsoft sets a default of 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month, and that figure can be managed by admins. No equivalent visibility or control exists for the unlicensed tier.
The rollout split by organisation size:
- 2,000 seats or fewer: limits on additional features applied from 2 November 2026
- More than 2,000 seats: limits apply from 9 November 2026
What this means for you
If you are an IT admin or decision-maker, the most practical implication is this: some of your users will start seeing “feature unavailable” messages in Copilot Chat, and you will have no dashboard to tell you how often it is happening or which features are being hit. The first signal you are likely to get is a licence request arriving in your admin centre, or someone raising a support ticket.
If you have been considering whether to purchase Microsoft 365 Copilot licences for all or part of your workforce, this change makes that decision slightly more pressing for anyone who relies on Copilot Chat regularly. The free tier still exists and still provides real utility, but Microsoft is clearly shaping the experience to make the licensed version the more reliable option for day-to-day use.
For organisations that want to understand their actual exposure before the limits bite, the most useful thing to do now is identify which teams use Copilot Chat most heavily and have a conversation about whether the unlicensed experience will still meet their needs. There is no telemetry to rely on here, so it is a qualitative exercise rather than a data-driven one.
It is also worth flagging to end users that if they see a “feature unavailable” message in Copilot, it does not mean something is broken. It means they have hit a fair use cap, and trying again later or the next day should restore access.
The broader picture
Microsoft has been careful to position Copilot Chat as genuinely included with Microsoft 365, and that remains true. The throttling approach mirrors how many software-as-a-service products handle the boundary between a free tier and a paid one: keep access open, but make the limits visible enough that users understand what the upgrade buys them.
What is unusual here is the deliberate opacity. Most services publish their usage limits clearly. Microsoft has chosen not to, citing the need to protect service quality and the fact that limits vary by feature and time of day. That may be operationally accurate, but it does make it harder for organisations to plan or communicate clearly with their staff about what to expect.
For now, the most useful resource for admins is the Microsoft support page on Copilot Chat limits, which explains the fair use framework even if it stops short of publishing specific numbers.