Yes, the Microsoft Copilot app is free. With a Microsoft account you can chat, search the web with sources, upload files, create images and talk to it by voice. It works on the web, Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android, within usage limits that Microsoft doesn’t publish as fixed numbers.
Two things aren’t free. Copilot inside Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint needs a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium subscription at home, or a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license at work. GitHub Copilot is a separate product with its own limited free tier for coding.
So is Copilot free? Mostly yes, with some exceptions. Below you’ll find every Copilot, what’s free, the limits, and when paying makes sense.
The reason this question is so confusing is simple. Microsoft uses one name for at least five different products, and it has renamed, merged and repriced them several times in the last two years. Here’s the cheat sheet.
Key terms used in this guide: copilot and large language model.
Which Copilot is free?
| Product | Free? | What’s included free | What needs a paid plan | Who it’s for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copilot app (copilot.com, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android) | Yes | Chat, web answers with sources, file uploads, image creation, voice, all at “limited” usage | Higher limits; Deep Research (Microsoft 365 Premium only) | Anyone with a personal Microsoft account |
| Copilot in Windows and Edge | Yes | Copilot app in Windows 11; Copilot button in Edge that can read your open tabs with permission | Some AI features in Paint, Notepad and Photos use AI credits from Microsoft 365 plans | Windows and Edge users |
| Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook (home) | No | n/a | Microsoft 365 Personal ($9.99/mo)orFamily($12.99/mo) with 60 AI credits a month for the owner; Premium ($19.99/mo) with “extensive” usage | Home users, students, freelancers |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat (work or school account) | Yes, with an eligible Microsoft 365 business or education plan | Web-grounded chat with enterprise data protection; Copilot in Outlook | Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote with your work data: Microsoft 365 Copilot ($30/user/mo,annual)orCopilotBusiness($21/user/mo list, up to 300 users) | Employees, schools, small businesses |
| GitHub Copilot Free | Yes | 2,000 code completions + 50 chat requests a month | Pro from $10/mo | Developers |
What you get with the free Copilot app
This is the Copilot most people mean when they ask “is it free?” You go to copilot.com, sign in with an Outlook, Hotmail or Xbox account (any personal Microsoft account works), and start typing. You don’t need to add a card or start a trial.
What’s actually in the box
Microsoft Copilot free covers more than most people expect. You get everyday chat for drafting, rewriting and brainstorming. You get web answers with linked sources, which is useful when you need to check where a claim came from. You can upload files and ask questions about them, create images from a text prompt, and use voice for real back-and-forth conversation. If you’re new to it, our guide on how to use Copilot walks through the basics.
Free users may also see ads. Microsoft says users under 18 don’t get personalized ones.
The limits nobody puts a number on
This part frustrates people. Older articles say free users get 15 image “boosts” a day, but that boost system is gone. Microsoft now labels free usage as “limited” and ties it to available capacity. When you hit a wall, Copilot tells you and you wait.
The free app also lost some features this year. On August 18, 2026, Microsoft retired Podcasts and Group Chat for consumers completely. Deep Research, the tool that turned one prompt into a long sourced report, now works only for Microsoft 365 Premium subscribers. This happened while Microsoft merged its consumer Copilot app and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app into one app.
If you’re still looking for “Copilot Pro,” you won’t find it. Microsoft stopped selling it, and support for existing subscribers ended on August 1, 2026. Its features now live in Microsoft 365 Premium.
Copilot in Windows and Edge: free?
Yes, both are free with a Microsoft account.
On Windows 11, Copilot is a regular app. It’s the same assistant with the same free limits, just on your taskbar. Some Windows tools are a different story: AI features in Paint, Notepad and Photos draw from the monthly AI credits that come with paid Microsoft 365 plans.
Edge changed a lot this year. “Copilot Mode,” the experimental AI browsing mode Microsoft launched in 2025, was retired in May 2026. Its features weren’t removed, though. They moved into the regular Copilot button in Edge on desktop and mobile. With your permission, Copilot can reason across your open tabs, which is handy when you’re comparing three laptops or five rental listings at once.
Copilot in Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint: what’s free and what needs Microsoft 365
This is where most “wait, I thought it was free” moments happen. The answer depends on one question: are you signed in with a personal account or a work account?
At home: you need a paid Microsoft 365 plan
Is Copilot free to use inside Word or Excel with a personal account? No. Microsoft bundled Copilot into its consumer subscriptions back in January 2025 and raised prices at the same time. Here’s how the home plans compare now:
- Microsoft 365 Personal ($9.99/month): Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, with 60 AI credits a month. Credits also cover image generation in Designer and similar tools.
- Microsoft 365 Family ($12.99/month): up to six people share the apps and storage, but only the subscription owner gets Copilot, with the same 60 credits. People sharing the plan get nothing extra.
- Microsoft 365 Premium ($19.99/month or $199.99/year): “extensive usage beyond standard credit limits,” plus features like Deep Research. Microsoft doesn’t publish a hard ceiling.
- Microsoft 365 Basic: no advanced AI features at all.
Is 60 credits a month a lot? For light use, yes: a few email drafts, some Excel help, the occasional image. If you use Copilot every day, it isn’t. There’s no top-up option on home plans, so your only way to get more is to switch plans. Once credits run out in Word or Excel, you can still use the standalone Copilot app, which has separate limits.
When you do have access, our step-by-step guides cover each app: Copilot in Word, Copilot in Excel, Copilot in Outlook and Copilot in PowerPoint.
At work: the April 15 change
For about seven months, business users had a nice deal. Starting in September 2025, anyone with an eligible Microsoft 365 business plan could use Copilot Chat inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote without an extra license.
Microsoft walked that back on April 15, 2026. Organizations with more than 2,000 users lost the in-app Copilot side panel for anyone without a paid license. Smaller organizations kept it, but under “standard access,” which means reduced quality and performance at busy times of day.
Outlook was spared. Unlicensed users still get Copilot with inbox and calendar grounding. Microsoft also added labels so you can tell which version you have: “Copilot Chat (Basic)” for the free one and “M365 Copilot (Premium)” for the paid one.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat vs Microsoft 365 Copilot for business
These two names differ by one word but they’re very different products.
Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is free for anyone signed in with a work or school account on an eligible plan, including Business Basic, Standard and Premium. It’s web-grounded AI chat with enterprise data protection, which matters a lot to IT teams. It does not read your company’s files, emails or Teams meetings, except for the Outlook features mentioned above.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is the paid add-on, and it’s the version that actually knows your work. It can summarize a Teams meeting you missed, find “that budget file Dana sent in March,” or draft a reply based on a whole email thread. Pricing has two tiers:
| License | List price | Who it’s for |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | $30/user/month, annual commitment | Any size, on top of a qualifying base plan |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Business | $21/user/month, annual (promotional pricing has run during 2026) | Organizations with up to 300 users |
Both require a Microsoft 365 base license underneath. For a 20-person team, that’s a real budget line, which is exactly why the free Chat tier matters. If your team lives in Teams, see how to use Copilot in Teams before you buy seats.
GitHub Copilot Free: what’s included
This one has nothing to do with Word or Excel. GitHub Copilot is a coding assistant that works in VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs and other editors.
GitHub Copilot Free gives individual developers 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests a month. Model selection is automatic, so you can’t choose which model answers. The counters reset monthly, and if only one of them runs out, the other keeps working.
Is 2,000 completions a lot? That’s roughly 90 a working day. It’s plenty for a side project. Fifty chat requests is about two a day, and if you use chat for debugging, you’ll burn through that in a week.
Some good news for students: verified students get a separate free Copilot Student plan with unlimited completions. Verified teachers and maintainers of popular open-source projects may get Pro free. Paid plans start at $10 a month for Pro, and since June 2026 usage is metered in AI credits. We break down whether that’s worth it in Is GitHub Copilot worth it?
Copilot Free vs ChatGPT Free vs Gemini Free
Here’s a quick look at the free tiers of the three big assistants. For the full head-to-head, read Microsoft Copilot vs ChatGPT and Gemini vs Copilot.
| Copilot Free | ChatGPT Free | Gemini Free | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| How limits work | “Limited,” capacity-based, no published numbers | Everyday chat with separate caps on uploads, images and research | Allowance refreshes every 5 hours, up to a weekly cap |
| Image creation | Yes, limited | Yes, capped | Yes |
| Deep Research | No (Premium only since Aug 2026) | Limited | Yes |
| Ads | Possible | Yes in the US | Not reported |
| Best fit | Windows, Edge and Outlook users | General-purpose chat | Google Workspace users |
There’s no single winner. Copilot makes the most sense if you already live in Microsoft’s ecosystem. If you’re on Google’s side, our guide Is Google Gemini free? covers what you get there.
Is it worth paying? A decision table
| Your situation | Free is enough | Pay for this |
|---|---|---|
| You chat, research and draft a few times a week | Copilot app | Nothing yet |
| You want Copilot inside Word and Excel at home, lightly | n/a | Microsoft 365 Personal ($9.99/mo) |
| Your family shares one plan and you all want AI in Office | n/a | Separate Personal plans; Family’s Copilot is owner-only |
| You hit limits often or need Deep Research | n/a | Microsoft 365 Premium ($19.99/mo) |
| College student | Copilot app + school’s Copilot Chat | Student discount on Microsoft 365 Personal ($4.99/mo) |
| Employee on a business plan, mostly chatting | Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat | Nothing |
| You need AI across your team’s email, files and meetings | n/a | Copilot Business or Microsoft 365 Copilot |
| Hobby coder | GitHub Copilot Free | Nothing |
| You code daily and lean on chat | n/a | GitHub Copilot Pro ($10/mo) |
Here’s a rule of thumb that works most of the time: start free and wait until you hit a limit at least twice in the same week. That’s usually when paying starts to make sense. If you’re still deciding which assistant to commit to, our list of Copilot alternatives is worth a look.
Free Copilot and your data
Free doesn’t automatically mean “you are the product,” but the defaults are worth checking. Here’s what Microsoft’s own privacy documentation says about the consumer app:
- Training is opt-out, not opt-in. On copilot.com, open your profile, then Privacy, and switch off model training on text and on voice. Microsoft says the change takes effect across its systems within 30 days.
- Some people are excluded by default. Copilot doesn’t train on conversations from work or school (Entra ID) accounts, from users who aren’t signed in, from signed-in users under 18, or from Copilot used inside Microsoft 365 apps on Personal and Family plans.
- Personalization is a separate switch. You can keep memory on and training off, or turn both off. Turning personalization off makes Copilot forget what it remembered about you, but it doesn’t delete your chat history.
- You can delete conversations from your history at any time.
- Ads can be personalized. You can opt out of personalized ads.
One practical habit beats any setting: don’t paste anything into a free consumer chatbot that you wouldn’t email to a stranger. At work, use Copilot Chat with your work account, since that’s the version with enterprise data protection.
Free Copilot is enough to start. Knowing what to ask is the real upgrade
People who get hours back each week from Copilot usually aren’t on a pricier plan. They just know how to write a prompt that gets a usable first draft instead of a generic one, and they know when to hand a task to AI and when not to.
If you want that skill without months of trial and error, try Coursiv’s 28-Day AI Certificate Program. It covers practical AI skills across popular tools, Copilot included, in short daily sessions, and you finish with a certificate of completion. You can also browse the full AI Certificate Program to see the Copilot course and the rest of the catalog.