Power Automate with Microsoft 365: what the business plans include, and when you need Premium or Process

Microsoft's Power Platform licensing guide lists Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium among the licences that include Power Automate cloud flows, to customise and extend Microsoft 365 for productivity. Microsoft's licensing documentation sets out what that covers, and what Power Automate Premium adds:

A connector is how a flow reaches another service. Microsoft's list of standard connectors includes SharePoint, Office 365 Outlook, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, Excel Online (Business), Microsoft Forms and Planner, as well as Gmail and Google Sheets. Its premium list includes Microsoft Dataverse, SQL Server, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Stripe, Calendly and MailChimp. A flow with even one premium connector needs a premium licence.

Whose licence counts depends on how the flow starts. An automated or scheduled flow runs as its owner, so if it uses a premium connector only the owner needs Premium. A flow started with a button runs as whoever starts it, so each person who runs it needs Premium, unless the flow has a Process licence of its own. A flow with no premium connector runs on the Microsoft 365 licence.

Desktop flows automate programs that have no connector, in Power Automate for desktop, by copying what a person does with the mouse and keyboard. Windows licences carry limited rights to it. Microsoft's FAQ says Windows 11 users can build desktop flows for personal productivity in the default environment and run them themselves, but cannot share them and have no cloud flows; Windows 10 users have the right to use it too, once they download it.

The licensing guide's appendix also ticks desktop flows for Microsoft 365 Business Premium, as it does for Windows 10 Pro and Windows Enterprise, and not for Business Basic or Business Standard. It describes the Windows rights as a free application, not for business-critical work, with no service level agreement or Microsoft support, no scheduled or automatic triggers, and no sharing of desktop flows.

Starting a desktop flow from a cloud flow, on a schedule or when something happens, needs Power Automate Premium for the person whose connection runs it. Premium includes one attended bot, which runs desktop flows on the machine that person has registered and is using. Unattended runs, with nobody at the machine, need a Process licence.

On Microsoft's Irish pricing page in October 2026, each paid yearly and before VAT:

Microsoft meters Power Automate in Power Platform requests. Every trigger and every action in a flow counts, including built-in steps such as initialising a variable, and failed actions count as well as successful ones. A loop counts each pass: Microsoft's example, a loop of two actions run ten times, uses 21.

The limits Microsoft documents, per licence and per 24 hours, are 6,000 requests for a Microsoft 365 licence, 40,000 for Power Automate Premium and 250,000 for each Process licence. They do not pool: in Microsoft's own example, eight people with 6,000 each do not share 48,000 between them.

Microsoft says those per-user figures are not the ones applied yet. During what it calls the licensing transition period, each flow has one limit shared by everyone who runs it: about 10,000 requests per 24 hours for a flow owned by a Microsoft 365 user, 200,000 for one owned by a Premium user and 500,000 for one with a Process licence, figures Microsoft calls approximations, not guarantees. It says enforcement of the documented limits will not start until at least six months after its usage reports are generally available.

Microsoft documents other limits as well:

List the connectors each flow needs first. If every one is standard and the flows fit within the Microsoft 365 limits, the business plan already covers them. If one is premium, the Premium licence goes to the flow's owner, or to everyone who runs it if it starts from a button, or a Process licence goes to the flow.

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