What does Microsoft Fabric cost? The arithmetic in euros
Microsoft publishes Fabric prices per capacity unit per hour, in dollars, per region. That is accurate and useless for a budget conversation. Below is the arithmetic the way we prepare it for clients: euros per year, region West Europe, excluding VAT.
The capacities
A Fabric capacity (F-SKU) is one pool of compute for all your workloads: data pipelines, lakehouse, Power BI via DirectLake, and planning. Every step doubles the capacity and the price.
| SKU | CU | Pay-as-you-go / year | Reserved (1 year) / year | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | F2 | 2 | € 3,387 | € 2,014 | | F4 | 4 | € 6,773 | € 4,028 | | F8 | 8 | € 13,546 | € 8,055 | | F16 | 16 | € 27,092 | € 16,110 | | F64 | 64 | € 108,369 | € 64,442 |
Reserved is roughly 41% cheaper than pay-as-you-go — but pay-as-you-go can be paused, reserved cannot. Prices: Azure Retail Prices, West Europe, August 2026, rounded. Check the maths yourself with € 1,007 per CU per year (reserved) or € 0.193 per CU per hour.
Pausing changes the sum
A pay-as-you-go capacity that is off at night and in the weekend runs about a quarter of the hours. For development environments and small workloads, a paused F2 or F4 is therefore often cheaper than reserved: tens to a few hundred euros per month. We set up the pause schedule with Azure Automation; that is part of the implementation, not extra work.
Which capacity do you need?
For reporting and a lakehouse: most organisations start on F2 or F4.
For planning (Plan in Fabric) you count by user role. Microsoft meters planning sessions of 30 days per user: a Planner consumes roughly 847 CU per session, a Stakeholder (input and approval) 168 CU, a Viewer 37 CU. Add about 30% for the other Fabric workloads. In practice:
| Capacity | Planners | Stakeholders | Viewers | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | F2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | | F4 | 1 | 5 | 10 | | F8 | 2 | 8 | 40 |
A planning group of twenty people with three real planners fits on an F8 of € 8,055 per year. For comparison: the same group via the Finance Premium route costs at least € 18,720 per year in licences — every year again.
Do not forget the Power BI licences
Below F64, every report reader needs at least Power BI Pro: € 12.10 per user per month, included in Microsoft 365 E5. Premium Per User (€ 20.80) is only needed for Premium features without an F-capacity. From F64 onward, viewers read for free — that threshold explains why large organisations grow towards F64.
The order we follow
- First measure actual consumption on a pay-as-you-go capacity.
- Then reserve the size the consumption proves. Not the other way around.
- Recalibrate quarterly: capacity is a dial, not a purchase.
We verify figures per client against the current Azure price list; the CU rates for planning roles are based on Microsoft's meters and the capacity planner of the Fabric planning community. Want the sum for your own situation? The licence calculator lives on Budgeting & forecasting, and a Data & BI Assessment (€ 6,000–9,000, fixed, excluding VAT) makes the capacity choice part of a well-founded scope.