Power Automate Pricing 2026: How Much Does It Cost?

Power Automate Premium costs $15 per user per month, billed annually. Unattended automation (Process) costs $150 per bot per month, or $215 with a Microsoft-hosted machine. Those three numbers are the whole list price. Almost nobody pays just that, because the moment a flow touches a non-Microsoft system, a shared mailbox, or more than a trickle of data, licensing rules and daily limits start deciding your real bill for you.

Every plan, in one table

List prices, billed annually, as they stood when we last checked on 24 September 2026.

Source: Microsoft — Power Automate pricing. If you're comparing this against an older article: the original "per flow" plan (around $100/month) was pulled from the price list in February 2024, over two years ago, and replaced by Process. A page still quoting that $100 figure as current hasn't been updated since.

Daily action limits by plan

Every step in a flow — a connector call, an HTTP request, even a simple "initialize variable" — counts as one action against a daily limit tied to the license, not to how complex the flow feels. This is the part that catches teams off guard on high-volume flows, and it's less commonly written up than the headline prices.

If you've ever opened the admin center and pulled the request report — Microsoft's own docs call this metric "Power Platform Requests," which is the same number your daily action limit counts against — you already know these numbers move faster in practice than the pricing page implies: a single loop over a few hundred spreadsheet rows can burn through a meaningful slice of a 40,000-action daily allowance before lunch.

Source: Microsoft Learn — Power Automate licensing FAQ. A Process license can also cover a group of up to 25 related flows sharing one 250,000-action pool, instead of licensing each flow separately.

Premium vs Process: the actual breakeven

Do the arithmetic yourself rather than trust a rule of thumb: Process costs $150/month; Premium costs $15/user/month. $150 ÷ $15 = exactly 10. If more than 10 people would otherwise each need their own Premium seat to run or approve steps in one shared automation, licensing that single flow under Process is cheaper than licensing the people. Below 10 people, per-user Premium usually wins.

That's a simplified comparison — Process also unlocks unattended runs that Premium can't do at all, so the decision isn't purely about headcount once a bot needs to run unsupervised. But the arithmetic itself takes about ten seconds, and it's the one question we'd want a sales rep to walk through with us before signing anything — not after.

The November 2026 AI Builder change

Microsoft's AI Builder documentation states plainly: seeded AI Builder credits — the 5,000 credits a month bundled into Premium and Process licenses — are removed on November 1, 2026. Capacity add-ons already stopped selling to new customers back on November 1, 2025, so this is the second half of a transition Microsoft announced roughly a year in advance (Microsoft Learn).

In a Power Platform Community thread, a Microsoft Super User confirmed the practical effect for existing customers: the seeded credits keep working right up to the November 2026 cutoff, and after that, any further AI Builder usage draws on Copilot Credits instead (Power Platform Community).

Work out your own number

Most pricing breakdowns of Power Automate stop at generic worked examples — someone else's headcount, someone else's mix of plans. We haven't found a public one that lets you enter your own numbers and get your own answer, so we built one, using the exact list prices above.

Two fixed reference points, using the same math, if you'd rather skim than type:

None of these include AI Builder capacity, Dataverse storage growth beyond the included allowance, or Copilot add-ons — each is billed separately.

Where teams get surprised

Three things come up often enough in public forums and reviews that we'd rather you hear them here than find out from an invoice.

A premium connector makes the whole flow premium — for everyone who touches it. One Microsoft community Super User put it bluntly: someone with only "run only" access to a flow still needs a full Premium license to trigger it, once that flow uses a premium connector, a custom connector, or an HTTP action (Fabric Community). A Microsoft 365 or Power Apps license doesn't cover that step.

Licensing changes have outpaced a lot of published guidance. One reviewer on Software Advice, reviewing after a recent licensing update, wrote that new versions "make you pay for everything that you create" — which is a stronger reaction than the plan structure alone suggests, but reflects real friction people hit as premium-connector rules tightened (Software Advice).

Throttling and daily limits are a cost driver, not just a technical detail. A community site that aggregates real Power Automate bug reports lists hitting API and action limits — sometimes with multi-hour delays even on paid plans — among the most common complaints that push teams toward a Process license earlier than they'd planned (I Hate Power Automate).

None of that is secondhand speculation you have to take on faith — the calculator above already shows you where your own headcount lands relative to these plans, before a sales conversation reframes the question for you.