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Fabric Planning capacity & cost

Size your Microsoft Fabric capacity by user role, then see the F-SKU that fits and what it costs each month
Size my capacity
The model
Three roles. One unit of capacity.
Planner
Builds and models the plan
1.16 CU
Stakeholder
Enters data and writes back
0.23 CU
Viewer
Reads the plan only
0.05 CU
Sustained CU per user: the share of your F-SKU each role keeps occupied. Add up everyone and that is the capacity you need.
Learn more about roles →
F-SKUs are Microsoft Fabric capacity tiers. F2 = 2 CU, F4 = 4 CU, F8 = 8 CU, and so on — the number is the total CU available in that tier.
01 Your users

Who is using Fabric Planning?

Rates below are sustained CU — the average capacity each user keeps occupied. Count everyone active in the same 30-day window.

Planner · 1.16 sustained CU/user 0.00 CU

Builds and models the plan.

Stakeholder · 0.23 sustained CU/user 0.00 CU

Enters or writes back data.

Viewer · 0.05 sustained CU/user 0.00 CU

Reads the plan only.

Automation jobs

Background jobs over the 30-day period. Each draws ~2 CU-hours, converted to a CU-equivalent and added to your capacity total. What counts as a job? →

0 jobs · 0.00 CU-equivalent*

* CU-equivalent: total CU-hours over the 30-day period divided by the hours in that period — the same conversion that defines the sustained CU rates above.

Add overhead buffer

Optional safety margin on top of consumption.

Buffer % added to your total CU

Total capacity needed

Sustained CU incl. 30% buffer

0.00 CU
02 Capacity that fits

Your plan

—


Total needed

03 What it costs

Your monthly bill

Show dollars

Region only changes the dollar price of one CU, not how much capacity you need.

Published Azure list prices for all 55 Fabric regions, snapshot dated 16 June 2026 — verify current rates on the Azure pricing page .

Picking a region does not confirm availability. Verify with Microsoft that both Fabric and Fabric Planning are offered in your selected region before relying on these figures.

Pay-as-you-go Reservation (1-yr)
Fabric capacity cost

Breakdown of this capacity cost

How the one capacity cost above divides up. These are not separate charges.

already part of the capacity you buy · headroom for other Fabric workloads (notebooks, pipelines, Power BI)

If you outgrow the capacity: both Reserved and pay-as-you-go hard-cap at the CU limit, and overage billing is a toggleable setting on both. With overage on, additional CU-seconds are charged at 3× the pay-as-you-go rate. With overage off, the capacity throttles. Reserved and PAYG behave the same way here; the difference between them is price and commitment.

04  How it works

How Fabric Planning is billed

For people, the cost follows a 30-day pattern: the first time a user takes an action, that action sets their role, and that role’s capacity is billed for the next 30 days. Background automation jobs bill differently, per successful run; see the Automation jobs section below. Five things set the bill for people.
Billing is based on sustained CU, and sustained CU only starts with activity. If no one opens a plan item for a month, no role is triggered and there is no charge. Off-season and unused months cost nothing.
01
Sustained CU is a seat license, not a meter.
The first time a user acts in a role, they take a 30-day license for that role, and that license is what sustained CU represents — a Planner holds 1.16 CU, a Stakeholder 0.23, a Viewer 0.05, occupying a fixed share of your capacity for the whole 30 days whether they sign in daily or once. It is not CU per hour and not CU-seconds, so it lines up directly with the SKU number. One Planner alone holds 1.16 of an F2's 2 CU — about 58% of the tier — which is why F2 cannot host a real deployment.
02
Your action sets your role, and your role sets the bill.
You do not pick a role; your first action picks it for you. View only and you are a Viewer. Enter or write back data and you are a Stakeholder. Build or model the plan and you are a Planner. A user who holds several roles is billed once, at the highest role only. Learn more about roles.
03
A session is a 30-day commitment.
Once an action opens a session, its full 30 days are billed. The sustained draw runs for the whole window from the moment it starts, and closing the session early does not reduce the cost. Sizing is about who is active in the same 30 days, not how many people have access.
04
Add up the sustained CU and pick an F-SKU above it.
Your total sustained CU across everyone active, plus the CU-equivalent of any automation jobs, is the capacity your plan needs. Microsoft meters this per second underneath, but from a capacity view it reads cleanly as the share of your F-SKU each role occupies.
05
Region changes price, not capacity.
The number of CUs each role consumes is the same in every region. What changes by region is the dollar price of one CU — from $0.18/CU-hour across the cheapest US and East Asia regions up to $0.31 in Norway West and South Africa West. The region selector carries the published rate for all 55 regions Microsoft prices Fabric in; if you hold a negotiated rate, or Microsoft opens a region it has not priced yet, enter the CU-hour rate and the page recalculates.
This calculator is kept deliberately simple: one consistent unit and one set of numbers. For the fuller, more detailed capacity estimator, see Lumel, Microsoft's development partner for Fabric Planning, at lumel.com. For the current dollar cost of a CU in your region, see Microsoft's Fabric pricing page.

One open question: whether Copilot and AI features draw from the same CU pool or bill separately. See the costing questions below for what we know so far.

Prices are per-CU figures derived from published F2 capacity pricing (F2 = 2 CU), in USD, as of June 16, 2026. Reservation reflects a 1-year monthly equivalent. Confirm current rates with Microsoft, as pricing changes.
05  Single role

What a single role costs on its own

The common case: someone opens a session and stays at one role for the full 30 days, no upgrade.
Role Sustained CU CU-hours / session Cost / 30-day session
Planner Builds and models the plan 1.16 847
Stakeholder Enters data and writes back 0.23 168
Viewer Reads the plan only 0.05 37
One automation job — 2

Central US pricing, $0.18 per CU-hour, as of 16 June 2026. Microsoft states a session as 30 days (730 hours). A user who holds several roles is billed once, at the highest role only.
06  Role changes

What happens when you change roles

Section 05 shows one role, flat for the full 30 days. This is the other case: a role change mid-session. Roles are earned by action — watch what an upgrade does to the bill, day by day.

CU-hours over 30 days
Day 1 Day 15 Day 30
Planner · 1.16 CU Stakeholder · 0.23 CU Viewer · 0.05 CU
The vertical scale adjusts to each scenario, so compare the CU labels on the upgrade markers, not the bar heights, across tabs. Microsoft states a session as 30 days (730 hours), making official per-session figures ~37 (Viewer), ~168 (Stakeholder) and ~847 (Planner) CU-hours; this chart uses clean 24-hour days (720 hours), so totals run slightly under. Budget with the 730-hour figures.
Your bill follows behaviour
Traditional planning tools charge the builder rate for every seat, all year. Fabric Planning charges it only while someone is building, and only for the person doing it. Viewers are nearly free by design. Most of a deployment’s sustained cost lands at Stakeholder — the people entering data during a cycle.
Downgrading does not lower the bill
You pay for the highest seat license held during the 30-day period. If a user’s first action is the highest role they will hold in that window, later viewing or data entry changes nothing — there is no partial refund and no automatic downgrade mid-session. The next window prices at whatever role is active when it opens.
07 Automation jobs

How automation jobs bill

An automation job is work Fabric Planning does without a user in session — a background process runs, not a person clicking through the app. Two examples show up in practice.
01
Planning-sheet sync
A detailed-level plan is saved. A backend job re-runs the full P&L plan to keep the two in sync. No human runs it; the job bills an automation fee.
02
PowerTable intake flow
A customer intake form built with PowerTable gets a submission approved. Downstream creates and updates fire automatically. Each triggered run counts as one automation job.
This is a PowerTable- and planning-sheet-native capability, not a Power Automate feature. Unlike per-seat workflow tiers in other tools, there is no bundled allowance and no monthly run cap to upgrade past: each job draws its own CU, at a small disclosed rate, against the F-SKU capacity you already own — 2 CU-hours per successful job, about $0.36 pay-as-you-go or $0.21 with a 1-year reservation. Add your expected job count in section 01 to fold it into your capacity total.
Why “CU-equivalent,” not sustained CU:  automation jobs bill per successful run, not as a continuously-held seat the way roles do. To size your F-SKU from one number, the calculator converts their total CU-hours into an average CU — divided by 730, the same conversion behind the role rates — which is why automation appears in the same total and breakdown even though it bills differently.
In Progress
Microsoft has confirmed automation jobs draw CU per job, distinct from the continuous sustained-CU model roles use, at a fixed cost per successful job. The exact per-job draw and what counts as a trigger are still being confirmed with the product team; this calculator uses 2 CU-hours per job as a working estimate.
Central US pricing, as of 16 June 2026. Other regions price a CU-hour higher or lower; confirm current rates with Microsoft.
08 Costing questions

Common costing questions

The pricing questions we hear most. For everything else about Fabric Planning, see the full FAQ.
A sustained CU is a seat license. The first time a user acts in a role, they take a 30-day license for that role, and it occupies a fixed share of your F-SKU for the period — whether they sign in every day or once. It is not a running meter: no CU per hour, no accumulating CU-seconds to add up, and the number maps directly onto the F-SKU scale. One Planner holds 1.16 CU, which is 58% of an F2's total 2 CU. That is why one Planner nearly fills the smallest SKU, and why F4 is the realistic floor for production planning.
Because they bill differently. Automation jobs bill transactionally, per successful job, the same way notebooks, pipelines and Power BI refreshes are metered. Sustained CU is a continuously-held seat license for the full 30-day session. To size one F-SKU from one number, the calculator converts total automation CU-hours over the period into an average CU — total CU-hours divided by the hours in the period, the same conversion behind the role rates. That equivalent is what appears in the capacity total and the dollar breakdown.
Billing starts when a session opens, and your role is set by what you do in it. Users start at the minimum — Viewer — and the system upgrades them automatically as they take higher-privilege actions: data entry or write-back moves them to Stakeholder; authoring, modelling or admin actions move them to Planner. A user holding several roles is billed once, at the highest. A role upgrade opens a new 30-day window at the higher rate, and once triggered that window is a commitment: the full 30 days are incurred even if an admin closes the session early.
A Viewer session: 0.05 CU held for 30 days, under $7 at Central US list rates. The peek is cheap; the upgrade is what to govern. Entering one number turns that Viewer into a roughly $30 Stakeholder session, and touching the model opens a roughly $150 Planner session. Treat any open as billable until told otherwise.
No cap. Within the 30-day session the role charge is fixed no matter how much you do — dozens of PowerTables, a hundred scenarios, thousands of edits, and the rate does not move. What scales with usage is the compute underneath, drawn from the Fabric capacity you already own; the seat itself stays fixed. That flat charge covers every artifact and unlimited activity across Planning Sheets, PowerTable Sheets and Intelligence Sheets, for whatever role you hold.
You are billed for the window, not the volume. Once you engage, the 30-day window is committed at your role rate, and ten entries cost the same as ten thousand. The same fixed charge that removes the ceiling also puts in a floor. The useful question is not the bill but whether that person belongs in the plan at all — if they do, the session cost is a rounding error next to what their time costs.
No. The window runs out either way, at the rate it opened at. Cost control happens before the click, by governing who gets access to which role in the first place — not by managing sessions after they have started.
No. Billing is based entirely on sustained CU, and sustained CU only starts with activity. The first action sets a role and opens a 30-day window for it. If nobody opens a plan item, no role is triggered and there is no charge. The one nuance is automation: a background job that fires in an otherwise idle month still bills its small per-job draw. No sessions and no jobs means no charge.
The same thing that happens on pay-as-you-go. Both capacity types hard-cap at the CU limit, and both offer overage billing as a toggleable setting. With overage on, additional CU-seconds are charged at 3× the pay-as-you-go rate. With overage off, the capacity throttles. Reserved and PAYG behave identically here — the difference between them is price and commitment. Size with headroom using the buffer setting above.
Pausing, resizing or deleting a capacity closes the books on every open session: the remaining days of each 30-day window bill out immediately instead of burning down over time. A restart is a pause plus a start, so the true-up rides along — but it is not a second charge. When capacity returns, users burn down hours already billed, and no new session opens until the original window would have ended. A restart accelerates the bill; it does not grow it.
Yes. Sessions key on the user plus the capacity, so one person active on two capacities opens two separate sessions, one on each.
They share the same pool, so size for the planning peak on top of your existing peak rather than as a separate allocation. The buffer setting in section 01 is one way to build that headroom in deliberately.
Traditional EPM tools charge annual per-seat licenses, and a viewer seat often costs nearly as much as a builder seat regardless of use. Fabric Planning is consumption-based: you pay for active use only, and the Viewer and Stakeholder tiers are priced deliberately low to make broad participation cheap. The planning workload draws from the same Fabric capacity you already run analytics on, and unused capacity stays available to the rest of Fabric. The comparison favours Fabric Planning most for seasonal cycles with many occasional participants.
Not confirmed. We do not yet know whether Copilot and AI features in Fabric Planning draw from the same CU pool or bill separately. Treat AI usage as a line item to verify during a POC.
Fabric Plan
Enterprise planning, Integrated with PowerTable and Intelligence, native to Microsoft Fabric. Co Engineered with Lumel.
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