💡 Our Technical Review in summary
Summary
- Microsoft is introducing a new “Message consumption” usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center specifically for the pay-as-you-go (metered) billing model of Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.
- This report provides granular visibility into billed messages, allowing organizations to monitor costs without requiring a traditional Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
- The feature is currently in Public Preview, with General Availability (GA) scheduled to begin and complete in March 2026.
Impact
- Granular Reporting: Admins can track message consumption at multiple levels, including total tenant usage, individual users, specific billing policies, individual agents, and specific agent-user pairs.
- Budget Oversight: The report includes daily and cumulative time series data to help identify usage patterns and forecast consumption costs.
- Proactive Alerts: To prevent unexpected overspending, the system will provide alerts when a user exceeds 2000 billed messages.
- Data Limitations: During the preview stage, the report will only display a maximum of 30 days of history. No data from before May 3, 2025, will be available.
- Access Path: The report will be enabled by default and located at Reporting > Usage > Microsoft 365 Copilot > Message consumption.
Action Required
- Verify Billing Setup: Ensure your pay-as-you-go billing policies are correctly configured in the Microsoft 365 admin center or Power Platform admin center to begin seeing data in these reports.
- Notify Stakeholders: Inform IT administrators, finance teams, and those managing “Integrated Apps” about the new reporting capabilities and the 2000-message alert threshold.
- Review Documentation: Familiarize yourself with the “Message consumption” section of Microsoft 365 usage reports to understand how billed messages are calculated.
- Monitor Preview Usage: Use the currently available Public Preview to establish a baseline for your organization’s Copilot consumption ahead of the March 2026 GA rollout.
Microsoft Official Update
Service: N/A
Category: stayInformed
Severity: normal
Updated December 12, 2025: We have updated the timeline below. Thank you for your patience.
To help you manage metered consumption costs for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, we will introduce a new Message consumption usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center. The new report will give you visibility into billed messages associated with your Microsoft 365 Copilot pay-as-you-go billing policies and includes total messages consumed, cumulative and daily time series, and messages per user, per billing policy, per agent, and per agent-user pair. The new report will roll out in preview. During the preview stage, the report will display a maximum of 30 days of message consumption history. Usage information from prior to May 3, 2025, will not be available in the report.
This message refers to Microsoft Copilot in a pay-as-you-go model. A Microsoft Copilot license is not required.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 490738.
[When this will happen:]
Public Preview: Available now.
General Availability (Worldwide): We will begin rolling out in March 2026 (previously late September 2025) and expect to complete by end of March 2026 (previously late September 2025).
[How this will affect your organization:]
After you have set up pay-as-you-go billing for Microsoft 365 Copilot, either in the Microsoft 365 admin center or the Microsoft Power Platform admin center, and you have enabled agent usage in your organization, you will see a new report including metrics for messages consumed at the levels of tenant, users, agents, and agent-user. To help you mitigate overspending, you will see alerts when users have consumed more than 2000 billed messages.
This new report will be on by default and will be available in the Microsoft admin center at Reporting > Usage > Microsoft 365 Copilot > Message consumption:
[What you need to do to prepare:]
This rollout will happen automatically by the specified date with no admin action required before the rollout. You may want to notify any admins that manage agents on the integrated apps page about this feature.
Learn more: Microsoft 365 reports in the admin center – Message consumption
