Microsoft 365, Office 365 Getting a Price Hike Next Year

Microsoft is raising the price of a Microsoft 365 subscription in March 2022. The price increase won't be drastic—it's just a few dollars a month—but it might come as a surprise to businesses that have paid the same amount for the service since it debuted in 2011.

That might seem like an awfully long time for a company to be subscribed to Microsoft 365, especially since the service wasn't technically introduced until 2017. But that's just the rebranded expansion of the platform; it officially debuted in 2011 under the Office 365 moniker.

Microsoft says the price increase “reflects the increased value we have delivered to our customers over the past 10 years.” The company backed that up with the claim that it's added 24 new apps to its software suites and shipped 1,400 new features in that time.

Those features were divided into three categories: communication and collaboration, security and compliance, and AI and automation. All told, Microsoft says its continued investment in the Microsoft 365 platform has allowed it to reach “over 300 million commercial paid seats.”

The sheer number of people using Microsoft 365 makes the impact of these incremental price increases even greater. This is how Microsoft plans to change the cost of the service (with all figures being the amount its customers will pay for each of their seats per month):

“These increases will apply globally with local market adjustments for certain regions,” Microsoft says. “There are no changes to pricing for education and consumer products at this time.” But we'll see if that changes as we get closer to March 1, 2022 and the prices officially rise.