What changes on 1 July
On 1 July 2026 Microsoft raises the list price of its main 365 suites. Office 365 E3 moves from 23 to 26 dollars per user per month, a 13 percent rise; Microsoft 365 Business Basic goes from 6 to 7 dollars, up 16 percent; and several enterprise tiers climb 5 to 8 percent. The increases do not hit every customer on the same day. They apply from each contract's next renewal, so the real bill lands whenever your term happens to end.
The published reason is added capability, from Defender for Office to Copilot Chat enhancements. That may be fair value for some buyers. The structural point is separate: the price of a suite most organisations treat as fixed infrastructure moved by double digits on a date Microsoft chose, and it can move again. A dependency you cannot reprice is a dependency someone else controls.
Why a price rise, not a principle, moved governments
Sovereignty arguments about American software have circulated in Europe for years without much action. What changed is that the cost line and the political line finally pointed the same way. On 8 April 2026 the French government ordered every ministry to move 2.5 million workstations off Microsoft and other non-European software, with dependency-reduction roadmaps due by autumn 2026. The minister's framing was blunt: the state cannot accept that its data, infrastructure and strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing and risks it does not control.
This is not a paper ambition. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has already shifted close to 80 percent of its 30,000 workplaces to LibreOffice and Linux, replacing Exchange with Open-Xchange and Thunderbird, and expects to save more than 15 million euros a year. Denmark's Digital Ministry began the same move in autumn 2025. Two years ago these were pilots. Now they are reference deployments with published budgets and headcounts, which is exactly what a private buyer needs before believing a migration is real.
The owner move: price the exit before the renewal
Most private owners will not, and should not, rip out Microsoft this year. The retraining, the migration labour, the security ownership you take on when you leave a managed suite, and the integrations that quietly depend on it are all real costs, and open source is not a free lunch. But there is a difference between staying because Microsoft is the best answer and staying because you never priced the alternative. Only the first is a decision.
The practical step is to build the exit option, not necessarily to use it. Inventory what actually runs on the Microsoft stack, cost a phased move for your two or three heaviest dependencies, and put a number and a timeline on it before your next renewal quote arrives. An exit option you have priced changes the renewal conversation even if you never migrate, because leverage you can document is leverage the vendor can see.
Read next: Sovereign Cloud Now Comes With a Score · Europe Is Building a Federated Cloud
