In Short: What Does Microsoft Fabric Cost in 2026?
Microsoft Fabric is priced on capacity: you buy an F SKU (F2 through F8192), each providing double the Capacity Units (CUs) of the one below it. Pay-as-you-go starts at roughly $263 per month for an always-on F2 in US regions, a 1-year reservation cuts roughly 41% off, and the price doubles with each SKU step. On top of capacity you pay separately for OneLake storage (commodity data-lake rates) and per-user Power BI licences where needed.
This guide gives you the full price list in US dollars, British pounds and South African rand, a pricing calculator you can run your own numbers through, and three worked examples. Prices are Microsoft's list prices for East US, UK South and South Africa North, checked on 25 September 2026 - always confirm current rates for your region on the Azure pricing page before you budget. For how the licence model works (who needs which licence), see our Fabric licensing guide; for how usage is measured once you are running, see how Fabric cost measurement works.
Microsoft Fabric Pricing Calculator
Pick your region, SKU and billing model to see what a capacity will cost per month. For pay-as-you-go, set how many hours a day the capacity runs - pausing development capacities overnight and at weekends is the single easiest saving in Fabric.
The calculator covers capacity and OneLake storage; below F64, Power BI Pro licences come on top. Not sure which SKU you need? Our capacity sizing guide sets out how to choose one from measured usage rather than data volume. The full price lists for each region follow below.
How Much Does Microsoft Fabric Cost? The Short Answer
For a business asking the question cold, three numbers frame the whole decision:
- Smallest viable production platform - about $156/month for an F2 reserved capacity, plus Power BI Pro licences for whoever publishes content.
- Typical mid-market analytics platform - about $1,500/month all in, on an F16 reserved capacity with around 20 Pro licences.
- Enterprise estate with a wide report audience - about $5,500/month on F64 reserved, at which point report viewers stop needing individual licences.
Everything else on this page is the detail behind those three figures. They are in US dollars for US regions; the UK and South African equivalents are in the price list below. Costs vary by Azure region - confirm current rates on the Azure pricing page for Microsoft Fabric before you budget.
The Three Things You Pay For
Every Fabric bill is made of three components:
- Capacity (F SKU) - the pool of compute all your Fabric workloads share. This is the big number.
- OneLake storage - billed separately per GB per month, at roughly $26 per TB in East US (about £18 in UK South, about R440 in South Africa North). Cheap, but not zero.
- Per-user licences - Power BI Pro (around $14/user/month) for anyone publishing or sharing Power BI content; viewers are free on F64 and above.
The F SKU Price List (2026)
Pay-as-you-go is billed hourly and can be paused; reserved requires a 1-year commitment and saves roughly 41% in every region. Monthly figures assume an always-on capacity (730 hours). Microsoft list prices, checked 25 September 2026.
US Prices (USD, East US)
- F2 - 2 CUs - about $0.36/hour pay-as-you-go (about $263/month always-on) or about $156/month reserved
- F4 - 4 CUs - about $526/month pay-as-you-go or about $313/month reserved
- F8 - 8 CUs - about $1,051/month pay-as-you-go or about $625/month reserved
- F16 - 16 CUs - about $2,102/month pay-as-you-go or about $1,251/month reserved
- F32 - 32 CUs - about $4,205/month pay-as-you-go or about $2,501/month reserved
- F64 - 64 CUs - about $8,410/month pay-as-you-go or about $5,003/month reserved
- F128 - 128 CUs - about $16,819/month pay-as-you-go or about $10,005/month reserved
- F256 - 256 CUs - about $33,638/month pay-as-you-go or about $20,011/month reserved
- F512 to F2048 - continue doubling per step, reserved discounts apply throughout
- F4096 and F8192 - generally available since September 2026 for sustained high-demand estates; confirm current rates on the Azure pricing page
UK Prices (GBP, UK South)
- F2 - 2 CUs - about £0.31/hour pay-as-you-go (about £226/month always-on) or about £134/month reserved
- F4 - 4 CUs - about £451/month pay-as-you-go or about £268/month reserved
- F8 - 8 CUs - about £903/month pay-as-you-go or about £537/month reserved
- F16 - 16 CUs - about £1,806/month pay-as-you-go or about £1,074/month reserved
- F32 - 32 CUs - about £3,611/month pay-as-you-go or about £2,148/month reserved
- F64 - 64 CUs - about £7,223/month pay-as-you-go or about £4,296/month reserved
- F128 - 128 CUs - about £14,446/month pay-as-you-go or about £8,591/month reserved
- F256 - 256 CUs - about £28,892/month pay-as-you-go or about £17,183/month reserved
South Africa Prices (ZAR, South Africa North)
- F2 - 2 CUs - about R7.68/hour pay-as-you-go (about R5,606/month always-on) or about R3,333/month reserved
- F4 - 4 CUs - about R11,212/month pay-as-you-go or about R6,666/month reserved
- F8 - 8 CUs - about R22,424/month pay-as-you-go or about R13,332/month reserved
- F16 - 16 CUs - about R44,848/month pay-as-you-go or about R26,664/month reserved
- F32 - 32 CUs - about R89,695/month pay-as-you-go or about R53,329/month reserved
- F64 - 64 CUs - about R179,391/month pay-as-you-go or about R106,658/month reserved
- F128 - 128 CUs - about R358,782/month pay-as-you-go or about R213,315/month reserved
- F256 - 256 CUs - about R717,563/month pay-as-you-go or about R426,631/month reserved
Two practical notes. First, pay-as-you-go capacities can be paused - a development capacity running only working hours costs roughly a quarter of the always-on number. Second, prices vary by Azure region, sometimes meaningfully; the ratios between SKUs stay constant.
Pay-As-You-Go or Reserved?
The decision is about workload stability, not size:
- Pay-as-you-go for evaluation, development, and spiky workloads - you pay hourly and can pause
- Reserved (1-year) for steady production - roughly 41% cheaper for the same SKU
The common pattern is a reserved capacity for production plus a small pay-as-you-go capacity for development and testing that gets paused outside working hours.
Update, 29 September 2026: Microsoft announced a third billing model at FabCon Europe 2026. On-demand billing will let you move individual billing categories outside a capacity and pay for the CU-hours they consume, and a new zero-provisioned F0 SKU has no upfront compute-capacity charge at all. Both are coming soon, in preview in the coming weeks, and pricing has not been published - on-demand is priced as a multiplier of the pay-as-you-go rate, and Microsoft has not said what the multiplier is. The announcements do not change the pay-as-you-go and reserved prices on this page; see Fabric F0 and on-demand billing explained and our FabCon Europe 2026 recap.
The F64 Threshold: The Most Important Line in the Price List
On F64 and above, report viewers no longer need Power BI Pro licences - anyone with a free licence can consume Power BI content. Below F64, every viewer needs Pro at around $14/user/month.
That creates a break-even worth modelling: a few hundred viewers on Pro licences cost more per year than the jump from F32 reserved to F64 reserved. Organisations with wide report audiences almost always land on F64 for this reason, not for the compute.
Three Worked Examples
Small team getting started
F2 reserved (about $156/month) plus 5 Power BI Pro licences (about $70/month): about $226/month, plus a few dollars of storage. Enough for a lakehouse, pipelines, and a handful of governed reports.
Mid-market analytics platform
F16 reserved (about $1,251/month) plus 20 Pro licences (about $280/month): about $1,531/month. Runs a full medallion lakehouse with scheduled refreshes and department-level reporting for a few hundred employees.
Enterprise estate
F64 reserved (about $5,003/month) plus Pro for 40 creators (about $560/month): about $5,563/month - with unlimited free viewers. Compare that against 500 viewers on Pro below F64 (about $7,000/month in licences alone) and the F64 economics explain themselves.
Is Microsoft Fabric Free?
There is a free trial and there is a free user licence, and they are different things. The trial gives you a full-featured capacity for a limited period; the free Power BI licence lets someone build in a personal workspace but not share properly with colleagues. Neither runs a production platform.
Our guide to what is and is not free in Fabric covers the trial, the free licence, what happens when the trial ends, and when free is genuinely enough.
Why It Is Sometimes Called Azure Fabric Pricing
Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS platform, but capacity is purchased and billed through Azure, which is why searches for "azure fabric pricing" and "microsoft fabric pricing" land on the same answer. You buy an F SKU in the Azure portal, it appears on your Azure bill, and Azure reservation discounts apply to it in the usual way.
This matters practically for two reasons. Existing Azure commitments and enterprise agreements can apply to Fabric spend, and your Azure cost management tooling can report on it alongside everything else you run.
What Is Not Included in the Capacity Price
Three costs sit outside the F SKU number and catch people out at budget time:
- Per-user licences. Anyone publishing or sharing Power BI content needs Power BI Pro, around $14/user/month, until you reach F64. See our Fabric licensing guide for who needs what.
- OneLake storage. Billed separately at roughly $26 per TB per month in East US. Small relative to compute for most estates, but not zero.
- Egress and networking. Usually negligible for analytics workloads, occasionally material if you are moving large volumes out of the platform regularly.
Then there is the cost that never appears on an invoice: the engineering effort to build the thing. Our regional guides put realistic numbers against that for the UK, the US and South Africa. And when the numbers need to convince a board, our business case guide covers how to frame them.
Fabric Capacity Versus Legacy Power BI Premium
Organisations still running Power BI Premium P SKUs face a separate question, because Microsoft has been steering customers from P SKUs onto Fabric F SKUs. The rough equivalence is that a P1 maps to an F64, P2 to F128, and P3 to F256, at broadly comparable capability for Power BI workloads.
The reason to move is not price alone - it is that an F SKU unlocks every other Fabric workload on the same capacity: lakehouses, pipelines, warehousing, real-time intelligence and data science, rather than Power BI alone. If you are weighing that decision, the Power BI Premium documentation sets out the current position.
How to Size Your Capacity
Data volume is the wrong sizing input. Consumption follows refresh frequency, query concurrency and workload efficiency, which is why two organisations with identical data sizes can need SKUs two tiers apart.
The reliable approach is to start one tier below instinct on pay-as-you-go, run real workloads for two to four weeks, read the Capacity Metrics app, then reserve the SKU the data supports. Our capacity sizing guide walks through the method, how smoothing and throttling work, and the mistakes that cost a tier.
If you would rather have the numbers checked before you commit to a reservation, our Microsoft Fabric consultants run licensing and capacity reviews as part of implementation planning, and our Power BI consultants can confirm whether Pro licences alone will cover your reporting. For everything that changes at that line - free viewers, Direct Lake limits and the P1 equivalence - see our guide to Microsoft Fabric F64.
Sources and Further Reading
- Azure pricing for Microsoft Fabric
- Power BI Premium documentation
- Build, deploy, and govern Microsoft Fabric at scale
Frequently asked
An always-on F2 capacity starts at about $263/month pay-as-you-go (about $156/month reserved) in US regions. A typical mid-market platform on F16 reserved with 20 Pro licences runs about $1,531/month. Enterprise F64 reserved is about $5,003/month with unlimited free report viewers.
Approximately $8,410/month pay-as-you-go or $5,003/month with a 1-year reservation in US regions (about 41% cheaper). F64 is also the threshold at which report viewers no longer need Power BI Pro licences, which is often the deciding factor for organisations with large report audiences.
Yes - this page includes a Fabric pricing calculator covering every F SKU in US dollars, British pounds and South African rand, with pay-as-you-go run hours, 1-year reservations and OneLake storage. Microsoft's Azure pricing calculator also covers Fabric for other regions. For real-world sizing, the more reliable method is running actual workloads on a pay-as-you-go capacity for a few weeks and reading the Capacity Metrics app before committing to a reservation.
Yes - pay-as-you-go capacities can be paused, and you stop paying compute while paused. A development capacity paused outside working hours typically costs around a quarter of the always-on price. Reserved capacities cannot be paused, which is why they suit steady production workloads.
A 1-year reservation saves roughly 41% versus pay-as-you-go for the same SKU. For example, F64 drops from about $8,410/month to about $5,003/month. Reserve once your production workload pattern is stable rather than on day one.
OneLake storage is billed separately from capacity at roughly $26 per TB per month in East US - comparable to commodity data-lake storage. For most analytics estates it is a small fraction of the total bill, but it is not included in the F SKU price.
