How much Microsoft Fabric costs

01

Microsoft Fabric pricing by capacity size #

Capacity sets the compute that all workspaces assigned to it share. The number in the name is the number of CUs: F2 has 2, F64 has 64 (Fabric licenses and capacities). The price grows in the same ratio, F4 costs twice as much as F2. The price list varies by Azure region. The documentation also lists even larger capacities, F4096 and F8192.

Fabric capacities and their monthly list price

Prices checked October 11, 2026 against Microsoft's price list, in euros excl. VAT, for Azure region Sweden Central. They may differ in rare cases by region, agreement and partner.

The monthly pay-as-you-go price in the table corresponds to 730 hours of nonstop running.

02

Pay-as-you-go, reservations and pausing capacity #

Pay-as-you-go is billed by Azure per second, with a one-minute minimum, for the whole time the capacity runs. The price doesn't depend on load. An F capacity can be paused and resumed in the Azure portal, through the REST API, or on a schedule through an Azure runbook (pausing a capacity). A paused capacity doesn't bill compute, and its content isn't available. When you pause, the remaining smoothed consumption is totaled and added to the invoice.

A reservation is bought for one or three years as a number of CUs in one region. An annual reservation comes out roughly 41% cheaper than pay-as-you-go. The discount applies hourly to the CUs of running capacities, and unused reserved hours are lost (Fabric capacity reservations). So a reservation can cover, say, one F64 or two F32s. The reservation doesn't cover storage and networking. That's why pausing a capacity under a reservation may not lower your costs (Fabric costs).

OneLake storage is paid separately, €0.02 per GB per month, even when the capacity is paused. It's billed pro rata by day, and deleted files are billed for another seven days while soft delete keeps them. Reads and writes to OneLake have no separate fee, they consume capacity CUs. When reading through a shortcut, the reading capacity pays for compute and the capacity that owns the data pays for storage (OneLake and capacity).

Spark can be switched to separate on-demand billing for an individual capacity. Spark jobs then don't draw on the capacity, you pay only for the jobs' run time, and the administrator sets a maximum number of CUs (Autoscale Billing for Spark). Smoothing doesn't apply to them in this mode.

Prices checked October 11, 2026 against Microsoft's price list, in euros excl. VAT, for Azure region Sweden Central. They may differ in rare cases by region, agreement and partner.

03

Smoothing and throttling: what happens under overload? #

Capacity compute is counted in 30-second timepoints. F2 delivers 60 CU seconds in each timepoint. An operation may briefly use more compute than the capacity delivers, and Fabric then spreads its consumption over future timepoints (throttling). This spreading is called smoothing:

• Interactive operations, such as report queries, are spread over at least 5 minutes, and up to 64 minutes depending on consumption.
• Background operations, such as refresh, notebooks and pipelines, are spread over 24 hours.

Spreading over 24 hours means that even a small capacity can carry a large background job. Microsoft gives an example: a job costing 1 CU hour adds only about 2.1% of an F2 capacity's compute to each timepoint. Fabric reports almost all operations in the Warehouse category as background operations.

When smoothed consumption exceeds the capacity's compute, a debt builds up. Fabric pays it off from the compute left free in later timepoints. The limits come in stages:

Throttling stages by capacity debt

Operations started before throttling began run to completion. Throttling ends once the capacity pays off the debt. A temporary capacity increase ends it faster, and so does pausing and restarting the capacity, in which case the debt is paid on the invoice.

Capacity overage is an optional F capacity feature that pays for an overload instead of throttling. It's billed at three times the pay-as-you-go rate, only for consumption that would otherwise trigger throttling (capacity overage). The capacity administrator sets a threshold in CU hours over a rolling 24 hours. The threshold isn't a hard spending cap: operations already running can exceed it. Capacity overage doesn't increase the capacity's compute, it only keeps operations from being delayed and rejected.

04

Fabric F64 and reader licenses #

From F64, users with a free Fabric Free license and the Viewer role in the workspace can read Power BI reports. Below F64, every reader needs a Power BI Pro, PPU or individual trial license (Fabric licenses). With an annual reservation, F64 costs about as much as 380 Pro licenses at list price.

For items outside Power BI, such as a Lakehouse, Warehouse, notebook or pipeline, a Free license is enough on a capacity of any size. Only a user with a Pro or PPU license can create and share Power BI content outside My workspace, even on F64 and larger. The Power BI pricing guide covers Power BI licenses in detail.

Copilot in Power BI and in Fabric runs only on a paid capacity of F2 or larger, or P1 or larger. It has no separate license, it consumes capacity CUs (how Copilot in Fabric works). Fabric Copilot capacity bills the Copilot use of selected users to one designated capacity, even when their content lives elsewhere (Fabric Copilot capacity). The guide to Copilot in Power BI covers the details.

Prices checked October 11, 2026 against Microsoft's price list, in euros excl. VAT, for Azure region Sweden Central. They may differ in rare cases by region, agreement and partner.

05

Power BI Premium capacity: moving from P1 to F64 #

Microsoft no longer sells Power BI Premium capacities P1 to P5. Each P capacity ends when the current agreement ends, and it can't be renewed through an expiring Enterprise Agreement (Premium transition FAQ). In compute, P1 matches F64, P2 F128, P3 F256, P4 F512 and P5 F1024. Microsoft adds to the table that it compares compute only, not features or licenses.

A P capacity was bought through Microsoft 365 with a contractual commitment, an F capacity is bought in Azure. Unlike P, an F capacity supports pausing and resizing at any time, and it doesn't have the autoscale of P capacities. Power BI Embedded is part of every F capacity, and readers with a Free license have access only from F64.

The move isn't automatic. Microsoft's procedure: buy an F capacity, reassign the workspaces to it, verify them, and only then cancel the P capacity. Within the same region, content moves with the workspace. When moving to another region, Fabric items and semantic models in the large storage format don't move over and have to be recreated. After a P capacity ends without a replacement, content stays available for 30 days, from day 31 operations are delayed, and from day 91 all operations are rejected.

06

What draws on capacity even when nobody's working? #

Storage items draw CUs when reading, writing and on maintenance, the stored data itself is paid as storage. Some items, though, draw compute even without any work from users:

• SQL database in Fabric bills compute while it's active and for another 15 minutes after. While running, it holds at least 2 GB of memory, which is billed as compute. Storage is billed all the time (SQL database billing).
• Eventhouse is billed by the time it's active and by the number of cores. Without activity it goes to sleep. In Capacity Planner mode it stays active all the time and draws at least 2 CUs (Eventhouse consumption).
• Warehouse and SQL analytics endpoint bill the number of allocated vNodes times the time they're allocated. Compute is allocated for at least one minute. System tasks, such as data compaction, also draw on capacity (Warehouse consumption).

The Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app shows the consumption of individual items and operations. We break down measured consumption of specific operations on the blog.

07

Fabric F0: pay only for what you use #

In September 2026 Microsoft announced the F0 capacity, with no prepaid compute. You pay only for the compute your items actually consume. F0 price: not in Microsoft's price list yet.

Prices checked October 11, 2026 against Microsoft's price list, in euros excl. VAT, for Azure region Sweden Central. They may differ in rare cases by region, agreement and partner.

08

Microsoft Fabric free and trial #

Fabric trial is a free trial capacity for 60 days. It's sized F4 or F64, and you can scale it from F4 to F64 if the tenant is eligible (Fabric trial). You can assign shared workspaces to the trial capacity too, and OneLake on it holds up to 1 TB of data. Copilot, data agent and Private Link don't work on it. Microsoft intends the trial for trying out and testing, not for production.

When the trial ends, the workspaces switch to the Pro type and Fabric items stop working. The content stays in OneLake for seven days. During that time you can assign the workspace to a paid F or P capacity and save the content.

FAQ #

Prices checked October 11, 2026 against Microsoft's price list, in euros excl. VAT, for Azure region Sweden Central. They may differ in rare cases by region, agreement and partner.

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