# Power BI Pro vs Premium Per User vs Fabric capacity: licensing and pricing explained for 2026 > Power BI Pro, Premium Per User and Microsoft Fabric F SKU capacity compared: what each license allows, who needs one to read a report, the F64 rule, pay-as-you-go versus reserved capacity, and how to size for 100 users. Canonical: https://o365hq.com/blog/power-bi-pro-vs-premium-per-user-vs-fabric-capacity-licensing-2026 Provider: IT Partner LLC — US Microsoft partner since 2006. Book: https://o365hq.com/book Published: 2026-11-09 · IT Partner Power BI licensing has three layers that look alike on a price list and behave very differently in a tenant: a per-user Pro license, a per-user Premium license, and a capacity bought through Azure as Microsoft Fabric. Which one a 20 to 500 person organization needs depends on who publishes, who only reads, how large the data models are, and whether the organization wants Fabric's data engineering alongside its reports. ## Power BI Free, and what it cannot do Every Microsoft 365 user can sign in to the Power BI service with the free license. They can build reports in Power BI Desktop, publish to their personal My Workspace and view content that someone has shared with them from a workspace hosted on a Fabric capacity of F64 or larger. What a free user cannot do is share: no publishing to a shared workspace, no app distribution, no subscriptions to others. For a team of analysts that is fine until the first report needs an audience, which is the point where Pro licensing starts. ## Power BI Pro: the per-user baseline Pro is the license most organizations buy first. A Pro user can create shared workspaces, publish and share reports and dashboards, build and distribute apps, schedule up to eight dataset refreshes a day, and collaborate on content with other Pro users. Model size is capped at 1 GB per semantic model and the workspace storage pool at 10 GB per user. Pro is included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5; every other plan, including Business Premium and E3, needs it as an add-on. The rule to remember is that both the author and the reader need Pro when the content lives in a Pro workspace. Twenty authors and two hundred readers means two hundred and twenty Pro licenses, which is the arithmetic that eventually pushes organizations toward a capacity. The list price is on the plan page, quoted as Microsoft list price from the November 2026 price list. ## Premium Per User: bigger models, more refreshes, same per-user model Premium Per User sits above Pro and includes everything Pro does. It raises the semantic model limit to 100 GB, allows 48 scheduled refreshes a day, and unlocks the features that used to require a Premium capacity: paginated reports, deployment pipelines, XMLA endpoint read and write for external tools, advanced AI visuals, dataflows with enhanced compute and incremental refresh at scale. It keeps the per-user rule. Content in a Premium Per User workspace can only be viewed by users who also hold Premium Per User, which makes it a license for the analytics team rather than for the whole organization. A finance group of twelve people who build large models and share only among themselves is the textbook fit. A company that wants three hundred staff to open a dashboard is not. ## Fabric capacity: F SKUs, pay-as-you-go and reservations Microsoft Fabric is the successor to Power BI Premium per capacity. Instead of a P1 or P2 license bought through Microsoft 365, you provision an F SKU in an Azure subscription: F2, F4, F8, F16, F32, F64, F128 and upward to F2048, each a fixed number of capacity units. The charge is Azure consumption, per capacity per hour, with a one-year reservation available at a lower hourly rate. Capacities can be paused and resumed, so a reporting workload that runs business hours only pays for those hours; a reserved capacity is paid whether or not it is paused. The F64 threshold matters. At F64 and above, readers do not need a Pro license to view content in a workspace assigned to the capacity; they can use the free license. Below F64, readers still need Pro. Authors need Pro at every capacity size. Fabric capacity also unlocks everything beyond reporting: lakehouses and warehouses, data pipelines and dataflows Gen2, notebooks, real-time intelligence, and Copilot in Fabric, which requires a capacity of F2 or above and consumes capacity units when used. Microsoft retired new purchases of Power BI Premium per capacity P SKUs in 2024 and 2025 and has directed renewals to F SKUs, so an organization still holding a P SKU should plan its move at the next renewal. ## Sizing a capacity for a 100-person organization A capacity is sized by the work it must absorb, not by headcount. Interactive report viewing, scheduled refreshes, dataflows and any Fabric engines all consume capacity units, and Fabric smooths bursts over a window so short peaks do not throttle immediately. A practical sequence for a 100-person organization with a handful of authors and everyone else reading: start with every author on Pro and the readers on Pro while the content is small. When the reader count passes the point where Pro licensing for readers costs more than an F64 capacity would, or when a model outgrows 1 GB, move the shared workspaces to a capacity. If data engineering is the goal rather than the reader count, start small, F2 to F8, keep readers on Pro, and grow the SKU as the pipelines do. The Fabric Capacity Metrics app shows utilization so the decision is made on measured load rather than guesswork. ## What goes through Azure and what goes through Microsoft 365 Pro and Premium Per User are Microsoft 365 licenses, bought per user on monthly or annual terms through IT Partner at Microsoft's list price. Fabric capacity is Azure consumption, metered hourly or reserved for a year, and appears on your Azure invoice; under a partner's Azure plan it is billed by IT Partner at pay-as-you-go rates, and under a direct subscription by Microsoft. Either way the capacity charge is Microsoft's and yours. The design, migration of workspaces and capacity governance are the implementation work, which is priced separately. ## Frequently asked questions ### Do readers need a license to view a Power BI report? In a Pro workspace, yes: Pro. In a Premium Per User workspace: Premium Per User. In a workspace on a Fabric capacity of F64 or larger: no, the free license is enough. ### Is Power BI Pro included in Microsoft 365 E3 or Business Premium? No. Pro is included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5 only; other plans add it per user. ### Can I still buy Power BI Premium P1? Microsoft has moved new purchases and renewals to Fabric F SKUs. Existing P SKU agreements run to their term and then move to F SKUs. ### What is the smallest Fabric capacity? F2. It is enough to try lakehouses, pipelines and Copilot in Fabric, but readers still need Pro below F64. ### Can a Fabric capacity be paused? Yes. Pay-as-you-go capacities stop accruing compute while paused; a reserved capacity is paid for its term regardless. ### Does Copilot in Power BI need a license? It needs a Fabric capacity of F2 or above, or Premium Per User for a subset of features, and it consumes capacity units when used. ## Sources - Microsoft Learn, "Power BI licensing for users in your organization" (Free, Pro and Premium Per User feature comparison), consulted November 2026. - Microsoft Learn, "Microsoft Fabric licenses" and "Microsoft Fabric capacity SKUs" (F SKU list, the F64 viewer rule, pause and resume), consulted November 2026. - Microsoft Learn, "Power BI Premium per capacity retirement and transition to Fabric", consulted November 2026. - Microsoft Learn, "Overview of Copilot in Fabric" (capacity requirement), consulted November 2026. - Microsoft Learn, "Azure Reservations for Microsoft Fabric capacity", consulted November 2026. ## Key takeaways - Pro is the per-user baseline for sharing and is included only in E5 plans; both authors and readers need it in a Pro workspace. - Premium Per User lifts model size and refresh limits and adds paginated reports and pipelines, but readers must also hold it, so it suits analytics teams rather than whole organizations. - Fabric F SKUs replace Premium per capacity: Azure consumption billed hourly or reserved, pausable, and at F64 and above readers need no Pro license. - Size a capacity on measured load with the Capacity Metrics app; the reader-count break-even and model-size limits are the two triggers to move from Pro. --- If your Power BI estate is outgrowing Pro, the Fabric and Power BI modernization service sizes the capacity, moves the workspaces and sets the governance.