What's Included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Published March 1, 2024, updated August 4, 2026
Microsoft 365 Business Premium includes everything in Business Standard, which is the Office desktop apps, business email, Teams, and 1 TB of OneDrive storage per person, plus a security and device management layer: Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Entra ID P1 with Conditional Access, Microsoft Defender for Business, Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, and the manual tier of Microsoft Purview. It lists at $22.00 per user per month on an annual commitment.
The practical reason to care about what is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium is that it is often the cheapest way for a small organization to get real security controls without buying and running four separate products. This post is for owners and office administrators at healthcare, legal, financial, and professional-services businesses who are looking at a quote for Business Standard and Business Premium side by side and cannot see what the difference actually is.
The three Business plans, side by side
Microsoft sells three main Business plans plus an apps-only option. Here is what each lists for, taken from the individual product pages rather than the comparison grid, which defaults to the Copilot-inclusive versions and shows much higher numbers:
| Plan | Paid yearly | Paid monthly | The short version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Basic | $7.00 | $8.40 | Email, Teams, and the web versions of the Office apps. No desktop Office. |
| Business Standard | $14.00 | $16.80 | Basic plus the installed desktop apps, webinars, and Clipchamp. |
| Business Premium | $22.00 | $26.40 | Standard plus device management, advanced identity, and threat protection. |
Two things worth noticing before you go further. The monthly price is exactly 20% higher than the annual price on every plan, which is the cost of being able to drop seats in any given month. And the gap between Standard and Premium is $8.00 per user, which is the number the rest of this post is really about.
What the extra $8.00 actually buys
The productivity apps in Standard and Premium are identical. Word is the same Word. Nobody gets a better Excel. Everything you pay the extra $8.00 for sits underneath, in the layer that decides who can sign in, from what device, and what happens when something goes wrong.
- Microsoft Intune. Device management for laptops and phones. This is how you push settings, require disk encryption, keep patching consistent, and wipe a phone that walked out the door with someone who no longer works for you. Without it, every device is configured by hand and stays that way.
- Microsoft Entra ID P1. Microsoft's documentation is explicit that Microsoft 365 Business Premium includes Microsoft Entra ID P1. The reason that matters is Conditional Access, which lets you write rules like "require multi-factor authentication unless the person is on a managed device" instead of taking the all-or-nothing security defaults. Conditional Access is not available on the free or Office tiers.
- Microsoft Defender for Business. Endpoint detection and response, which is software on the computer itself that watches for attack behavior rather than only matching known-bad files. It is a different job from traditional antivirus and it is usually the control a cyber insurer is asking about.
- Defender for Office 365 Plan 1. Attachment and link inspection on inbound mail, plus impersonation protection. This is the piece that catches the invoice-change email pretending to come from your bookkeeper.
- Azure Information Protection and the manual Purview tools. Sensitivity labels people apply themselves, retention policies, data loss prevention for Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive, and Message Encryption for sending protected email outside the organization.
If you are weighing this against your current setup, the honest comparison is not "we already have antivirus." It is whether you have device management, whether you can enforce sign-in rules, and whether anyone would know if a mailbox were quietly forwarding mail to an outside address. Those are the gaps Business Premium is built to close, and they are the same gaps our security work starts with.
The compliance half: manual is included, automatic is not
Business Premium includes a real slice of Microsoft Purview, and it is worth being precise about which slice, because this is where most published guidance overstates things.
What you get is the manual tier. You can create and publish sensitivity labels for people to apply themselves. You can set retention policies. You can run data loss prevention on Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive. You get Audit (Standard) and Compliance Manager. That is genuinely useful and it covers a lot of what a small practice needs.
What you do not get is anything that happens automatically. Auto-labeling, auto-apply retention, trainable classifiers, Content Explorer, Insider Risk Management, and Endpoint DLP all sit at the E5 tier. If you want them without moving to E5, there is now a Purview Suite edition made specifically for Business Premium. We walk through the whole split in our guide to what Purview you already own.
One trap worth naming here: auditing is not switched on by default for the Business plans. Microsoft documents this plainly, and it surprises people who assume the log has been quietly recording since day one. It has not been. Somebody has to turn it on, and it does not backfill.
What Business Premium does not include
Being clear about the ceiling saves an awkward conversation later.
- Windows Enterprise edition. You get Windows Pro upgrade rights, not Enterprise.
- Power BI Pro and Teams Phone. Both are separate purchases. Together they are $24.00 per user, which is more than the plan itself.
- The automatic Purview tier and the full Defender product family. Available as Business Premium add-on suites, covered in our Business Premium vs E5 comparison.
- Backup. This is the one that catches people. Microsoft replicates your data for their own resilience, and the recycle bin and retention policies help, but neither is a backup you can restore from after a bad month of ransomware or a departing employee's cleanup. Budget for third-party backup separately.
- More than 300 people. The cap is 300 provisioned licenses per tenant across Business Basic, Standard, Premium, and Apps for business combined. It is not 300 of each.
How to decide
The question is not really whether Business Premium is a good plan. At $22.00 it is very hard to assemble the same set of controls for less. The question is whether your organization will actually turn any of it on.
Business Premium bought and left in the box is $8.00 per user per month of nothing. We see this often: a business is paying for Premium, has never enrolled a device in Intune, has never written a Conditional Access policy, and is functionally running Standard at a premium price. The plan does not configure itself.
So the useful test is: are you subject to a regulation or a cyber insurance questionnaire that asks about MFA, device encryption, and endpoint detection? Do people work on laptops outside the office? Do you handle patient, client, or financial records? If yes to any of those, Business Premium is the right floor and the work is in the setup. If you are a five-person shop where everyone works on one desktop in one room and nothing regulated ever touches it, Standard may genuinely be enough.
If you want to sanity check the mix across your whole organization rather than one plan at a time, our Microsoft 365 license decision tree walks you through it in five questions, and the licensing calculator prices the result.
Frequently asked questions
What is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium?
Everything in Business Standard, which is the Office desktop apps, business email, Teams, and 1 TB of OneDrive per user, plus a security and management layer: Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Entra ID P1 with Conditional Access, Microsoft Defender for Business, Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, and the manual tier of Microsoft Purview.
How much is Microsoft 365 Business Premium?
$22.00 per user per month on an annual commitment, or $26.40 per user per month if you pay monthly. Business Standard is $14.00 and Business Basic is $7.00 on the same annual terms, so Business Premium is $8.00 per user above Standard.
What is the difference between Business Standard and Business Premium?
Standard and Premium have identical productivity apps. The entire $8.00 difference is security and device management: Intune, Entra ID P1, Defender for Business, Defender for Office 365 Plan 1, Azure Information Protection, and the manual Purview tools. If you never use those, you are paying for nothing.
Does Microsoft 365 Business Premium include Entra ID P1?
Yes. Microsoft's own documentation states that Microsoft 365 Business Premium includes Microsoft Entra ID P1, which is what gives you Conditional Access. That is the single most useful thing in the plan, because Conditional Access is how you enforce MFA on your own terms rather than through security defaults.
Is there a user limit on Microsoft 365 Business Premium?
Yes, 300. The cap is 300 provisioned licenses per tenant across Business Basic, Business Standard, Business Premium, and Apps for business combined, not 300 of each. Past that you keep the 300 you have and license the rest on an Enterprise plan in the same tenant.
Does Business Premium make us HIPAA compliant?
No plan does that on its own. Business Premium gives you most of the technical controls a HIPAA risk analysis will ask about, and Microsoft's Business Associate Agreement covers the in-scope services, but the configuration, the documentation, and the policies are still work you have to do.
Is Business Premium worth it if we already have a firewall and antivirus?
Usually yes, because the overlap is smaller than it looks. A firewall protects the office network and does nothing for a laptop at home. Business Premium is aimed at identity and the devices themselves, which is where most incidents now start.
Getting the value out of Microsoft 365 Business Premium
What is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium is, in one line, the security and management layer that Business Standard leaves out, for $8.00 more per person. The plan is good value at $22.00. The value only shows up once Intune is enrolling devices, Conditional Access is written down, Defender is reporting, and auditing has been switched on.
If you would like to see what that would look like for your business, including which of these you are already paying for and not using, Desert Lakes Solutions offers a no-pressure discovery call to walk through your tenant and where the easy wins are. Book a discovery call.
