Microsoft Fabric Pricing 2026: Capacities, Licensing, Real Costs
Microsoft Fabric is priced on three things: a capacity (compute, billed by the hour), OneLake storage (billed per GB per month), and Power BI per-user licenses for the people who build or view reports. The smallest capacity, F2, costs about $262.80 per month pay-as-you-go or about $156.33 per month reserved for a year, in US regions as of August 2026. A realistic first production setup for a mid-sized company lands between $300 and $1,500 per month in capacity, plus $14 per month for each Power BI author.
The three parts of a Fabric bill
| Part | What it covers | How it is billed |
|---|---|---|
| Fabric capacity (F SKU) | All compute: pipelines, notebooks, warehouse queries, Power BI refreshes and report rendering, Copilot | Per capacity unit (CU) per hour, pay-as-you-go or annual reservation |
| OneLake storage | Data you store in lakehouses, warehouses, KQL databases, mirrored databases | Per GB per month, by storage tier |
| Power BI per-user licenses | Creating and (below F64) viewing Power BI reports | Per user per month, paid yearly |
Capacity is the big line item. Storage is cheap. Licenses are small per person but add up across a large audience, which is why the F64 threshold matters.
Fabric capacity pricing by SKU (US regions)
Capacity is sold in F SKUs from F2 to F8192. The number is the capacity units (CUs). The pay-as-you-go rate in East US is $0.18 per CU per hour. The one-year reservation rate is $938 per CU per year, which works out to roughly 41 percent less. A three-year reservation is listed at $2,814 per CU, the same annual rate, so there is no extra discount for the longer term.
Monthly figures below use 730 hours per month (Azure's convention). Prices are for East US and vary a little by region.
| SKU | CUs | Pay-as-you-go per hour | Pay-as-you-go per month | 1-year reserved per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F2 | 2 | $0.36 | $262.80 | $156.33 |
| F4 | 4 | $0.72 | $525.60 | $312.67 |
| F8 | 8 | $1.44 | $1,051.20 | $625.33 |
| F16 | 16 | $2.88 | $2,102.40 | $1,250.67 |
| F32 | 32 | $5.76 | $4,204.80 | $2,501.33 |
| F64 | 64 | $11.52 | $8,409.60 | $5,002.67 |
| F128 | 128 | $23.04 | $16,819.20 | $10,005.33 |
| F256 | 256 | $46.08 | $33,638.40 | $20,010.67 |
| F512 | 512 | $92.16 | $67,276.80 | $40,021.33 |
| F1024 | 1024 | $184.32 | $134,553.60 | $80,042.67 |
| F2048 | 2048 | $368.64 | $269,107.20 | $160,085.33 |
Source: the Azure Microsoft Fabric pricing page and the Azure retail prices API, checked 21 August 2026. F4096 and F8192 also exist and follow the same per-CU rate.
Each step up doubles the CUs and doubles the price. There is no volume discount built into the SKU ladder. The only discount is the reservation.
Pay-as-you-go vs reservation
Pay-as-you-go:
- Billed per second with a one-minute minimum.
- You can pause the capacity from the Azure portal or by API. While paused you pay nothing for compute. Storage is still billed.
- You can scale up or down between SKUs at any time.
Reservation:
- You commit to a number of CUs for one year (or three) and pay about 41 percent less. Pay up front or monthly.
- You pay whether or not the capacity is running. Pausing a reserved capacity saves nothing, and unused reserved hours do not carry forward.
- The reservation covers capacity compute only. OneLake storage and networking stay at pay-as-you-go rates.
- Reservations are per region and are bought in the Azure portal under Reservations, separately from the capacity itself. Buy the number of CUs you use, in increments of one CU, and the discount applies automatically to any matching capacity in that region.
Rule of thumb: run pay-as-you-go for the first two to three months, watch the Capacity Metrics app, then reserve the size you settle on. If you only need compute during business hours and can pause overnight and at weekends, pay-as-you-go at roughly 50 hours a week costs about 30 percent of the full-month figure, which beats the reservation discount.
How capacity usage works
You do not get a separate bill per job. Every operation (a pipeline run, a notebook, a SQL query, a report refresh, a Copilot prompt) draws CU-seconds from the capacity you already pay for. Fabric smooths interactive operations over at least five minutes, and up to 64 minutes for heavy ones, and background operations over 24 hours, so a heavy nightly load spreads across the day.
Going over 100 percent for a moment costs nothing. Fabric gives you 10 minutes of future capacity as overage protection, then delays new interactive jobs by 20 seconds, then rejects interactive jobs once you have borrowed an hour, then rejects everything once you have borrowed 24 hours. Pausing clears the throttle but bills the accumulated overage.
Practical implication: you size for sustained average load, not peak. Many teams that expect to need F64 run fine on F16 or F32 once nightly jobs are scheduled sensibly.
OneLake storage pricing
Storage is billed per GB per month, separately from capacity. East US rates as of August 2026:
| Storage type | Price per GB per month |
|---|---|
| OneLake hot | $0.026 |
| OneLake cool | $0.019 |
| OneLake cold | $0.004 |
| OneLake cache | $0.20 |
| SQL database storage | $0.25 |
| SQL database backup storage | $0.10 |
| Mirroring replica storage | $0.026, with a free allowance |
1 TB (1,024 GB) in hot storage costs about $27 per month. A 10 TB lakehouse costs about $266. Storage is rarely the line that hurts.
Two notes:
- Mirrored databases get one free terabyte of replica storage per capacity unit: 64 TB free on F64, 128 TB on F128, and so on. The background compute that does the replication is free too and does not draw CUs. Querying that data does.
- Business continuity (BCDR) storage, which keeps a second copy in a paired region, is priced separately. Check the pricing page for your region if you enable it.
OneLake read and write transactions also consume CUs from your capacity rather than being billed as separate storage operations.
Power BI licensing inside Fabric: the F64 rule
This is the part that decides whether Fabric is cheap or expensive for your organization.
Per-user license prices (August 2026, paid yearly):
| License | Price | What it allows |
|---|---|---|
| Fabric Free | $0 | Build and share non-Power BI items (lakehouses, notebooks, pipelines) on any F capacity. View Power BI reports only on F64 and above. |
| Power BI Pro | $14 per user per month | Create, edit, and share Power BI reports in shared workspaces. View reports on any capacity. |
| Power BI Premium Per User (PPU) | $24 per user per month | Everything in Pro plus Premium features such as larger models and more refreshes. Does not provide a Fabric capacity. |
The rules, from the Microsoft Fabric licensing documentation:
- Anyone who creates or edits Power BI reports, semantic models, or dashboards outside their personal workspace needs Pro or PPU. This is true on every SKU, including F64 and above.
- On capacities below F64 (F2 through F32), every person who views a Power BI report also needs Pro or PPU.
- On F64 and above, viewers need only the Fabric Free license and a viewer role on the workspace.
- Non-Power BI items (lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks) need no paid per-user license on any F SKU.
Worked example. You have 5 report authors and 300 report viewers.
| Option | Capacity | Licenses | Monthly total |
|---|---|---|---|
| F32 reserved | $2,501.33 | 305 × $14 = $4,270 | $6,771.33 |
| F64 reserved | $5,002.67 | 5 × $14 = $70 | $5,072.67 |
F64 is cheaper once you have roughly 180 or more viewers, even though the capacity itself costs twice as much. Below that audience size, a smaller SKU plus Pro licenses wins. Do this sum before you pick a SKU.
For the wider question of what Fabric adds on top of Power BI, see Microsoft Fabric vs Power BI.
Copilot and the Fabric trial
Copilot in Fabric needs an F2 or larger SKU (or a P SKU). It has no separate price. Copilot prompts consume CUs from your capacity at the standard rate, and Microsoft also lists a consumption meter for "Copilot and AI" usage. On a small SKU, heavy Copilot use shows up as throttling, so monitor it.
The free trial lasts 60 days and gives you the equivalent of an F64 capacity. It is the cheapest way to measure what your real workload consumes before you buy. Copilot and Azure OpenAI features are not available on the trial.
What a realistic Fabric bill looks like
Three scenarios, all US regions, August 2026 prices, reserved capacity where noted.
| Scenario | Setup | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Small team replacing a SQL Server reporting database | F4 reserved, 500 GB hot storage, 5 Pro licenses, 20 viewers on Pro | $312.67 + $13 + $350 = about $676 |
| Mid-sized company, nightly ETL plus departmental reporting | F16 reserved, 3 TB hot storage, 10 Pro authors, 60 viewers on Pro | $1,250.67 + $80 + $980 = about $2,311 |
| Company-wide reporting, 500 viewers | F64 reserved, 10 TB hot storage, 15 Pro authors, viewers on Free | $5,002.67 + $266 + $210 = about $5,479 |
These figures exclude implementation. What a consultant charges to design and build the platform is covered in our Microsoft Fabric implementation guide.
Where Fabric costs surprise people
- Leaving pay-as-you-go running 24/7 at a size you chose by guesswork. The fix is the Capacity Metrics app and a scheduled pause for non-production capacities.
- Buying F32 and then discovering every viewer needs Pro. Work out the viewer count first.
- Development and test capacities. Each environment is its own capacity. Use F2 for dev and pause it outside working hours.
- Runaway notebooks and unoptimized Spark jobs. A badly written notebook can consume a day's smoothed capacity in an hour. This is an engineering problem, not a pricing one, and it is why a sensible medallion architecture and scheduled loads matter.
- Choosing between a lakehouse and a warehouse for the wrong reasons. Both consume CUs, but query patterns differ. See lakehouse vs warehouse in Fabric.
- Capacity overage billing. Turning it on stops throttling, but the overage compute bills at three times the standard rate ($0.54 per CU hour in East US instead of $0.18).
- P SKUs. Power BI Premium per-capacity P SKUs are being retired and are only available to customers with an active Enterprise Agreement. New buyers should use F SKUs.
How to estimate your own cost in 20 minutes
- Count Power BI authors (need Pro) and viewers.
- If viewers are under about 180, plan for a SKU below F64 plus Pro for everyone. If over, plan for F64 and Free viewers.
- Start the 60-day trial, load a representative slice of data, and run your real pipelines and reports for two weeks.
- Open the Capacity Metrics app and read the peak smoothed utilization as a percentage of 64 CUs. Multiply 64 by that percentage and round up to the next SKU.
- Estimate storage in TB and multiply by $27.
- Run pay-as-you-go for the first quarter, then reserve.
FAQ
How much does Microsoft Fabric cost per month?
The smallest capacity, F2, costs about $262.80 per month pay-as-you-go or about $156.33 per month on a one-year reservation in US regions (August 2026). F64, the size at which report viewers no longer need Power BI Pro licenses, is about $8,409.60 pay-as-you-go or about $5,002.67 reserved.
Is Microsoft Fabric free?
There is a 60-day free trial that gives you the equivalent of an F64 capacity. After that you pay for a capacity. The per-user Fabric Free license costs nothing but only lets you build non-Power BI items on a paid or trial capacity.
Do I still need Power BI Pro licenses with Fabric?
Anyone who creates or edits Power BI reports in a shared workspace needs Pro ($14 per user per month) or Premium Per User ($24). Viewers need Pro on capacities below F64. On F64 and above, viewers with the free license and a viewer role can open reports at no per-user cost.
What is the difference between pay-as-you-go and reserved Fabric capacity?
Pay-as-you-go bills per second at about $0.18 per capacity unit per hour in US regions and can be paused. A one-year reservation costs about $938 per capacity unit per year, roughly 41 percent less, but you pay for the full year whether or not the capacity runs.
How much does OneLake storage cost?
OneLake hot storage is $0.026 per GB per month in East US (August 2026), so 1 TB costs about $27 per month. Cool is $0.019 and cold is $0.004 per GB per month. Storage is billed separately from capacity.
Where Maxwize fits
Maxwize sizes, builds, and tunes Microsoft Fabric environments for small and mid-sized companies in the US, UK, UAE, and India. Typical data analytics projects run from $1,000 to $20,000 depending on sources and scope, and a sizing review before you commit to a reservation usually pays for itself in the first quarter. See our Microsoft Fabric services or get in touch.