Microsoft Fabric is priced by capacity size, not by user. The smallest capacity, F2, lists at $262.80 a month pay-as-you-go in the US, or $156.33 a month with a one-year reservation. Each size up doubles the price, to $8,409.60 a month for an F64 (or $5,002.67 reserved). F64 is the size that replaced Power BI Premium P1, and it's the smallest one where people can view reports without their own Pro license. On top of the capacity, anyone who builds or publishes Power BI content still needs a Pro license, and so does every viewer on anything smaller than F64. For a small business that only needs Power BI reports, Pro licenses alone are usually cheaper.
What each size costs
These are Microsoft's US list prices from the Azure pricing page, checked October 6, 2026. Prices vary by Azure region and by agreement.
| Size | Capacity units | Pay-as-you-go per month | One-year reservation per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| F2 | 2 | $262.80 | $156.33 |
| F4 | 4 | $525.60 | $312.67 |
| F8 | 8 | $1,051.20 | $625.33 |
| F16 | 16 | $2,102.40 | $1,250.67 |
| F32 | 32 | $4,204.80 | $2,501.33 |
| F64 | 64 | $8,409.60 | $5,002.67 |
The sizes keep going up to F8192, but if you're reading this, you won't need them.
Storage in OneLake is billed separately, at $0.023 per GB per month for hot storage on the same page. For a small business that's usually a few dollars a month.
What a capacity unit buys you
A Fabric capacity is a pool of computing power that everything in its workspaces shares: report queries, semantic model refreshes, dataflows, pipelines, warehouses, notebooks and Copilot. The F number is how many capacity units (CUs) you get. An F2 has 2 CUs running all day, every day.
Fabric smooths usage out over time, so a heavy refresh doesn't fail just because it spikes for a minute. But if you keep using more than the capacity has, Fabric starts throttling: report queries get delayed, then rejected, and if it goes on long enough, background jobs like refreshes get rejected too. That's the real cost of buying too small. Reports that are slow every morning for reasons nobody can see.
Pay-as-you-go or reservation
Pay-as-you-go bills by the hour (with a one-minute minimum) through your Azure subscription. You can resize it up or down whenever you like, and you can pause it in the Azure portal to stop the charges. Content on a paused capacity isn't available to anyone, so pausing suits a test capacity, not the one your team opens every morning.
A reservation is a one- or three-year commitment for a set number of CUs, at about 41% less. The discount applies hour by hour, and reserved hours you don't use are lost, so pausing a reserved capacity doesn't save you anything.
What we'd do: start on pay-as-you-go for a month or two, watch actual usage in the Fabric Capacity Metrics app, then reserve the size you really need.
What happened to Power BI Premium capacity
If you're searching for Power BI Premium capacity, you'll find Microsoft no longer sells it to new customers. Here's the timeline Microsoft published:
- July 1, 2024: Premium capacity SKUs (P1 to P5) came off the price list for new customers.
- January 1, 2025: Customers without an Enterprise Agreement could no longer renew them.
- End of the agreement: Customers on an Enterprise Agreement can renew P SKUs until their current agreement ends, then they have to move to Fabric.
Each P SKU has a matching F SKU with the same number of capacity units:
| Premium | Fabric equivalent |
|---|---|
| P1 | F64 |
| P2 | F128 |
| P3 | F256 |
| P4 | F512 |
| P5 | F1024 |
If you're still on a P SKU, don't let it lapse. Microsoft's migration guide says that after a P SKU subscription ends, the capacity runs free for 30 days, then interactive use is throttled from day 31 to 90, and from day 91 everything on it is blocked. Your data is kept, but nobody can use it. Plan the move before your renewal date.
The biggest practical changes when you move: F SKUs are bought in the Azure portal and billed through Azure instead of the Microsoft 365 admin center, prices are set by region, and you can pause or resize them. You also get the rest of Fabric (warehouses, lakehouses, pipelines) on the same capacity.
The F64 free-viewer math
The one feature people buy F64 for is letting viewers read reports without a Pro license. It's worth doing the math before you buy.
An F64 on a one-year reservation is $5,002.67 a month. Power BI Pro is $14 per user per month. Dividing one by the other, F64 only pays for itself once you have about 357 people viewing reports. On pay-as-you-go it's about 600. And your report builders still need Pro either way.
Most small and mid-sized businesses are nowhere near that number. If you have 40 people using Power BI, Pro for everyone is $560 a month, about a tenth of the F64 price.
When a small business should buy a Fabric capacity
Buy one when you need something Pro doesn't give you, not to make Power BI work better. The cases we see:
- Copilot in Power BI. It needs at least an F2, and you can set an F2 up as a Copilot-only capacity while your reports stay on Pro. See Copilot in Power BI.
- A place to store and combine data. Pulling several systems into one warehouse or lakehouse, or replacing an aging SQL database that only exists to feed reports.
- Bigger models or more refreshes for a whole team. If only a few people need this, Premium Per User at $24 a user is usually cheaper than a capacity.
- Hundreds of report viewers. See the F64 math above.
If you're not sure what size you need, Microsoft's Fabric capacity estimator is a reasonable first guess. Then size from real usage, because guesses tend to be wrong in both directions.
When to call someone
Capacity sizing is where small businesses lose money quietly: an F8 bought "to be safe" that runs at 10%, or an F2 that throttles every report at 8 a.m. If you're about to buy capacity, or moving off a P SKU before a renewal date, a second opinion is cheap compared to a year's reservation.
We cover licensing, capacity sizing and Premium-to-Fabric moves in Power BI Advisory. If reports are slow or failing right now and you suspect the capacity, start with the $299 Power BI fix. Our post on why Power BI reports load slowly covers the model-side fixes worth trying before you pay for a bigger size.
Sources: Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Fabric pricing; Microsoft, Power BI pricing, Power BI Premium SKU retirement; Microsoft Learn, Premium migration decision guide, Pause and resume your Fabric capacity, Save costs with Fabric capacity reservations, Fabric throttling policy, Fabric Copilot capacity.