What does Copilot cost in Business Central?

Copilot is included in every Business Central online licence, with no additional licence. Additional costs only arise from the consumption of certain AI features via Copilot credits, above all with the autonomous agents, and this consumption is visible and controllable in the admin center. The entry barrier is therefore zero, the running costs follow usage. The cost block that really decides the calculation, however, rarely appears in any offer: the preparatory work on the data foundation the AI works on. The prerequisite for all of it is Business Central online; on-premises installations are left out.

The three cost blocks at a glance

The specific credit rates and packages change with Microsoft’s release cycles, which is why this page deliberately names the model instead of snapshots: included in the licence, consumption follows usage, control in the admin center. We check the current state against the Microsoft documentation in the conversation.

What credits are consumed for and how you stay in control

The built-in Copilot aids in daily work are part of the licence. Consumption arises where AI works autonomously: the Sales Order Agent creates orders from customer emails, the Payables Agent processes incoming invoices up to approval, both are generally available. The more of this work the agents take over, the more credits they consume, and the more manual work they replace. So the calculation is not a cost risk but a volume picture: visible in the admin center, limitable per environment.

Which agents exist and what they take over in daily work is covered in the overview Business Central agents and AI in the ERP and in Which AI agents are there in Business Central?

The cost block that rarely appears in offers

Licence and credits are the smallest position in the calculation. The block that decides the benefit is the data foundation: agents work on your master data, rules and processes, and they accelerate what they find, good data and bad. An agent working on duplicates and empty fields produces faster errors, not benefit. Why that is and what the preparatory work covers is in AI agents and the data foundation.

For planning this means: include the preparatory work honestly in the AI calculation instead of postponing it as a separate data project. It is a one-off, it pays into every further AI feature, and it is the part that an offer without a data view calculates too smoothly.

What this means for getting started

With an entry barrier of zero, the sensible path does not start with the cost question but with the process question: which of your processes is mature enough for an agent to carry it? A pilot process with a clean data situation, a measured before-and-after and a limited credit budget answers the cost question with your own numbers instead of an estimate. How AI changes overall project effort is covered in Does AI change ERP project effort?

Source: Microsoft Learn: enabling AI in Business Central

Worked example with figures, as of September 2026

The sections above describe the model. For planning you still need figures once, with a date: the following rates come from Microsoft's billing documentation and price list of 9 September 2026 and can change with every release.

• Sales Order Agent: a typical order from a customer email costs 14 credits (read email 2, check availability 5, create quote or order 5, write reply 2), plus 5 credits per attachment containing order data.
• Payables Agent: 50 credits per vendor invoice plus 5 per invoice line. Before activation it processes the first 50 invoices in trial mode without credits.
• Expense Agent: 50 credits per receipt, regardless of the number of items. More in What does the Expense Agent do in Business Central?
• Price of credits: a pack of 25,000 credits costs 200 US dollars a month, unused credits expire. Billed pay as you go, one credit costs around one US cent.

A mid-sized company with 100 customer orders from emails and 100 vendor invoices with three lines each per month consumes 1,650 plus 6,500, that is 8,150 credits. In the pack that is around 65 US dollars, pay as you go around 82 US dollars a month. That is less than a single hour of rework on wrongly created orders costs. The figure confirms what this page says above: it is not the credits that decide the bill, but the data foundation the agents work on.

For anyone not in the cloud, the answer is here: Is there AI for Business Central on-premises and Dynamics NAV?

Paid licences without use are the most expensive case: Our employees are not using Copilot. Why?