On April 1, 2026, Microsoft moved a long list of Teams Premium features into the base Teams Enterprise license. The changes are already live. If you have not revisited your Teams licensing since then, this is the catch-up.

The short version: most of what mid-sized businesses actually bought Teams Premium for is now included with their standard Microsoft 365 plan. A smaller, more focused Premium feature set still costs $10 per user per month. Two new add-on charges showed up that did not exist before.

The practical view follows.

What moved to base Teams Enterprise

The town hall and webinar feature sets are the headline change. If you run all-hands meetings, virtual events, or customer webinars on Teams, almost everything that used to require Premium is now part of your Enterprise license.

For town halls

For webinars

Immersive 3D events for up to 300 attendees moved to base too, if that workflow is on your radar.

One important catch on capacity. Town halls under base Teams Enterprise top out at 3,000 attendees with full engagement features (Q&A, polls, reactions) plus a 10,000-attendee view-only experience. To scale above that you now buy an Attendee Capacity Pack as a separate add-on. Pricing for the pack had not been finalized at launch.

Microsoft Places end-user features

Places Finder, Places Explorer, space reservations, and building check-in all moved into base. Anyone with a calendar in your Microsoft 365 tenant can now use them. The licensing flip is that the cost has moved from per user to per space.

What is still Premium ($10 per user per month)

Teams Premium did not disappear. It got smaller and more focused. The features that stayed are the ones with a regulatory, brand, or AI flavor.

The pattern is clear. Microsoft kept the things that matter to regulated industries, large brands, and the contact-center crowd. Everything that the median IT buyer actually wanted from Premium (eCDN, advanced webinars, town hall scale) went into the base.

The two new add-on costs

This is the part that gets buried in vendor write-ups. Two add-ons appeared on April 1, and depending on how you use Teams, one or both may apply.

  1. Attendee Capacity Pack. Required to host town halls above 3,000 engaged attendees or 10,000 view-only. If you used to run 50,000-person company-wide meetings on a single Premium license, that workflow now needs a capacity pack sized to your event.
  2. Teams Shared Space license. $8 per month per space, with each "space" covering up to four desks. This is the new model for Microsoft Places. If your office has fifty bookable desks, you need roughly 13 Shared Space licenses for full coverage.

The Shared Space change is the one IT teams should pay attention to. The old model charged Premium per user and gave that user access to Places everywhere. The new model gives everyone Places booking features at no extra charge, but you pay per physical space your organization actually licenses.

For most companies that is a win. Most organizations have more employees than bookable desks. Companies with a small Premium user count and a large number of bookable spaces will pay more.

The grandfather clause you should know about

If you purchased Teams Premium licenses before April 1, 2026, your users keep access to everything Premium previously included until your current term expires. That includes the 100,000-attendee town hall capability without buying an Attendee Capacity Pack.

When the term renews, you renew into the new, smaller Premium feature set, and the Attendee Capacity Pack becomes a separate purchase if you need it.

Plan the renewal conversation now. If you have a March or April 2027 renewal coming up, the budgeting should reflect what your Premium license will actually cover at that point.

Who saves, who pays more

For most mid-sized businesses, this is a net savings. Town hall and webinar features that justified the Premium spend are now included. If your Premium use case was webinars with custom branding, registration management, and eCDN streaming, you can drop most of those Premium seats at your next renewal.

For organizations heavily invested in Microsoft Places across many bookable spaces, the math gets harder. The per-space licensing scales with your real-estate footprint, not your headcount, and a large hot-desking office may end up paying more under the new model.

For event-heavy organizations that routinely run 20,000-plus-attendee town halls, the Attendee Capacity Pack is the new line item. Even at a generous price, a few annual events of that size likely cost less than blanket Premium licensing for the entire org used to.

For contact centers, regulated industries, and brands that pay for Premium because of E2E encryption, watermarking, intelligent recap translation, or the Queues app, Premium is still required. Nothing changed for you except that some of your Premium-licensed users may no longer need the seat.

Should you still buy Teams Premium?

The decision is cleaner now than it was a year ago.

Buy Premium for:

Skip Premium if:

A real audit usually finds a mix. Most companies have a small group of users who genuinely need Premium and a much larger group that was licensed for it because eCDN or town halls were the only way to get those features. Right-sizing at renewal recovers real budget.

Bottom line

The April 2026 changes are mostly good news for the typical IT buyer. The features that mattered moved to base. The features that stayed Premium are the ones with clear, narrow use cases.

The work to do now is renewal-side. Pull your current Premium seat count, sort it by who actually uses the Premium-only features that remain, and plan to reduce. If you have a renewal in the next two quarters, that conversation with your reseller is the one that captures the savings.

For broader Microsoft 365 budgeting context, see Microsoft 365 Business subscriptions compared and the full Teams plans comparison.