Power BI licensing explained: Free vs Pro vs PPU vs Fabric capacity

Power BI licensing has four moving parts: a free licence that does less than people expect, Pro at £10.80 per user per month, Premium Per User at £18.50, and Fabric capacity priced by compute rather than headcount. The rule that decides most SME decisions is the F64 threshold — above it, read-only users need no paid licence at all.

What does each licence actually allow?

Licences in Power BI govern two separate things: what you can build and share, and what you can view. Most confusion comes from conflating them.

Capability	Free	Pro	PPU
Access the Fabric web app	Yes	Yes	Yes
Create Power BI items outside My workspace	No	Yes	Yes
Create Pro workspaces	No	Yes	Yes
Create PPU workspaces	No	No	Yes
Create non-Power BI Fabric items on F or Trial capacity	Yes	Yes	Yes
View Power BI items in a Pro workspace, or on an F SKU below F64	No	Yes	Yes
View content on F64+ or P capacity with a viewer role	Yes	Yes	Yes

(Source: Microsoft Learn, Understand Microsoft Fabric licenses and capacity.)

The line that catches people out is row three from the bottom. A free licence will not let someone open a report a colleague published to a shared workspace — unless that workspace sits on a large enough capacity. Every organisation using Power BI needs at least one Pro or PPU licence, because without one nobody can share anything.

What do they cost?

As of September 2026, on Microsoft's UK pricing page and excluding VAT:

Licence	UK price	Billing
Power BI Desktop	Free	—
Power BI (free service licence)	Free	—
Power BI Pro	£10.80 per user/month	Paid yearly
Premium Per User	£18.50 per user/month	Paid yearly
Fabric capacity (F SKUs)	Priced per capacity unit, regionally	Per second via Azure, or yearly reservation

(Microsoft Power BI pricing, UK.)

Fabric capacity is bought through Azure and billed per second with no commitment, with a yearly reservation available at a discount. Because pricing is regional and changes, we have kept the specific F-SKU figures out of this post deliberately — our Power BI pricing estimator models them against your own user counts, which is the only way the comparison means anything.

What is the F64 threshold?

This is the single most important number in Power BI licensing, and it is not a price.

Fabric capacities run from F2 up to F8192, measured in capacity units. F64 is the equivalent of the old P1 Premium SKU, at eight v-cores. It is also the point where the licensing model inverts:

• On F64 or larger, a user with only a free licence and a viewer role on the workspace can view Power BI content.
• On any F SKU below F64, every user viewing Power BI content must have their own Pro, PPU or individual trial licence.

For a business with ten report builders and four hundred read-only consumers, that distinction is the entire decision. Below F64 you are buying four hundred and ten Pro licences. At F64 you are buying ten.

The break-even is straightforward arithmetic, and you should do it with your own numbers rather than trusting anyone's rule of thumb: take the annual cost of the F64 capacity in your Azure region, divide by the annual cost of a Pro licence (£10.80 × 12 = £129.60 excluding VAT), and that is the number of viewers at which capacity starts to win. Below that count, per-user licensing is cheaper. Above it, capacity is.

Two things that skew the sum. A yearly capacity reservation is cheaper than pay-as-you-go, which moves the break-even down. And capacity gives you Fabric workloads as well as cheaper viewing, so if you want lakehouses or notebooks anyway, the capacity is doing two jobs.

When is PPU the right answer?

PPU sits in an awkward middle and is frequently either over-bought or ignored entirely.

It gives you most Power BI Premium features on a per-user basis: 48 data refreshes a day rather than eight, support for semantic models above 1GB, and the XMLA endpoint. Microsoft's own guidance is that PPU is more cost effective than capacity when Premium features are needed for fewer than 250 users.

The critical caveat, and the most common misunderstanding we see: PPU does not provision a Fabric capacity. You cannot create or run lakehouses, warehouses or notebooks on PPU alone. If someone has sold you PPU as "Fabric for small teams", that is wrong — it is Power BI Premium features for small teams, which is a different product.

If your problem is "our model is too big and refreshes too slowly", PPU is likely your answer. If your problem is "we want to build a lakehouse", it is not.

What about the old Premium P SKUs?

Skip them. Microsoft is consolidating purchase options and retiring the Power BI Premium per-capacity P SKUs, and its documentation now advises new and existing customers to consider Fabric F capacity subscriptions instead.

If you are on a P SKU today through an Enterprise Agreement, it still works, and Fabric items can be enabled on it. But it is not the thing to buy in 2026, and any proposal that quotes you a P SKU deserves a question about why.

How do we choose in practice?

Four questions, in order:

How many people build, and how many only read? Builders always need Pro or PPU. Readers are where the money is decided.

Do you need Premium features? Large models, frequent refresh, XMLA. If yes and you are under 250 users, price PPU before capacity.

Do you want Fabric workloads? Lakehouses, warehouses, pipelines, notebooks. If yes, you need an F capacity — PPU will not do it.

Have you done the F64 arithmetic with your own viewer count? Most SMEs have not, and most of them are correctly on per-user licensing. Some are quietly paying for two hundred Pro licences when a capacity would be cheaper.

Licensing is only one of three cost lines in a Power BI project, and rarely the largest — our guide to budgeting a Power BI project covers the build and run alongside it, and the Power BI consultancy page explains how we scope the work, within our broader data practice. If you are not yet sure what the consultant part involves, start here.

Frequently asked questions

What can you actually do with a free Power BI licence?

Less than most people assume. A free licence lets you build reports in Power BI Desktop and in your own My workspace, and it lets you create and share non-Power BI Fabric items on an F or Trial capacity. What it does not let you do is create or share Power BI reports in a shared workspace, or view Power BI content in a Pro workspace or on a Fabric capacity smaller than F64.

What is the difference between Pro and Premium Per User?

Pro is the standard licence for building and sharing Power BI content. PPU adds most Power BI Premium features on a per-user basis — 48 refreshes a day, semantic models over 1GB, and the XMLA endpoint. Microsoft's own guidance is that PPU is more cost effective than capacity when Premium features are needed for fewer than 250 users.

What is the F64 threshold and why does everyone mention it?

F64 is the point where the licensing model flips. On a Fabric capacity of F64 or larger, users holding only a free licence and a viewer role can view Power BI content. On any F SKU below F64, every single person viewing a report needs their own Pro, PPU or trial licence. That is why the sums change so sharply once you have a lot of read-only consumers.

Does PPU give us Fabric?

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding. PPU is a per-user feature set, not a capacity. It does not provision Fabric, so you cannot create or run lakehouses, warehouses or notebooks with PPU alone — that needs an F capacity or a trial capacity.

Should we still be looking at Power BI Premium P SKUs?

Generally no. Microsoft is consolidating purchase options and retiring the Power BI Premium per-capacity P SKUs, and its documentation advises new and existing customers to consider Fabric F capacity subscriptions instead.

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Easy Insight is a UK consultancy for AI, web, apps and data — senior specialists only, no juniors.