Microsoft 365 for Charities: What You're Entitled to for Free and What It Actually Costs

There is a reasonable chance your charity is overpaying for its digital tools right now. Not because you made a bad decision — but because the Microsoft Nonprofit Programme is one of the least well-publicised entitlements available to UK charities, and the organisations that know about it tend to be larger ones with a dedicated finance or IT function to navigate it.

For small and medium charities running on personal email accounts, shared spreadsheets, and free versions of tools that were never designed for organisational use, what Microsoft makes available to eligible UK charities is, in practical terms, extraordinary. The question is whether your organisation knows it qualifies — and what it is actually entitled to.

What Changed in July 2025

Before going further, there is something important to flag. The Microsoft Nonprofit Programme changed materially in July 2025, and a significant number of articles online have not caught up with those changes.

Prior to July 2025, eligible charities could receive free grants covering Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Office 365 E1 licences. Both of those free tiers have been discontinued. What remains — and this is still substantial — is up to 300 free Microsoft 365 Business Basic licences per eligible charity, plus discounts of up to 75% on paid plans.

If you read something online suggesting you can get Business Premium for free, that information is out of date. The current position is Business Basic at no cost, with paid upgrades available at heavily discounted rates.

What You Get for Free

Microsoft 365 Business Basic is the free tier currently available to eligible UK charities, for up to 300 users. At the standard commercial rate this would cost £4.90 per user per month — meaning a charity with 20 staff members would ordinarily pay just under £1,200 per year for this package alone, before any other tools are considered.

What Business Basic includes is genuinely useful for most small charities:

Microsoft Teams for video calls, messaging, and internal communication. Exchange for professional business email on your own domain. SharePoint for shared document libraries and internal pages. OneDrive with 1TB of cloud storage per user. Web-based versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, accessible from any browser on any device.

What it does not include is equally worth knowing. Business Basic does not come with the full desktop versions of Microsoft Office applications. If your team needs Word, Excel, or PowerPoint installed locally on their machines rather than accessed through a browser, you will need a paid upgrade.

What the Paid Tiers Cost for Charities

For charities that need more than Business Basic offers, the discounted pricing on paid plans is still significantly below commercial rates.

Microsoft 365 Business Standard — which adds desktop Office applications and additional business tools — is available to eligible charities at approximately £2.42 per user per month, compared to the standard commercial rate of £9.99.

Microsoft 365 Business Premium — which adds enterprise-grade security, device management, and advanced compliance tools — is available at approximately £4.41 per user per month, compared to the commercial rate of around £18.

For larger charities and those with more complex needs, Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 enterprise licences are also available at significant discounts. These are worth discussing with a Microsoft partner if your organisation has more than 50 staff or handles sensitive beneficiary data at scale.

Who Qualifies

To access Microsoft's nonprofit offers, a UK charity must meet the following criteria. It must be registered with the relevant charity regulator — the Charity Commission in England and Wales, OSCR in Scotland, or CCNI in Northern Ireland — or be HMRC-exempt. It must have a documented non-discrimination policy. It must be able to demonstrate that it operates for the public benefit. And for the free Business Basic tier specifically, it must have an annual revenue under £3.5 million.

Importantly, nonprofit grants are available only for paid employees and unpaid executive staff. Volunteers are eligible for discounted licences but not for free grants. This is a distinction worth understanding before you plan your licence structure.

What Most Charities Miss

Beyond the core Microsoft 365 licences, eligible charities can access a range of additional Microsoft tools at reduced or no cost that most small organisations are entirely unaware of.

Microsoft Azure cloud credits — approximately £1,500 per year — are available as a grant to eligible charities. For organisations running databases, digital services, or online applications, this is a meaningful contribution toward infrastructure costs.

Microsoft Power Platform — which includes tools for building custom workflows, automating repetitive processes, and creating simple internal applications without writing code — is available at heavily discounted rates. For a charity managing volunteer rotas, grant applications, or referral processes through manual spreadsheets, these tools can save significant staff time.

Power BI, Microsoft's data reporting and visualisation platform, is available at a discounted rate and allows charities to build clear, professional dashboards showing impact data — the kind of reporting that funders and trustees increasingly expect to see.

None of these tools require a specialist IT team to set up. But they do require someone to take the time to understand what is available, confirm eligibility, and configure things properly from the start.

The Setup Problem

This is where many charities get stuck. The Microsoft Nonprofit Programme is well-structured and genuinely generous. The eligibility process, however, requires documentation, and the configuration of a Microsoft 365 environment — done properly — involves more than creating a few email accounts.

Done well, a Microsoft 365 setup gives your charity professional email addresses on your own domain, a shared document environment that actually works, a communication platform your team will use, and security settings that protect your beneficiary data and keep you on the right side of GDPR. Done poorly — or left half-finished — it creates confusion, duplication, and a patchwork of tools that nobody fully understands.

The difference between those two outcomes is almost always in the setup and the ongoing management, not in the tools themselves.

What to Do Next

Start at Microsoft's nonprofit portal — nonprofit.microsoft.com — and work through the eligibility checker before investing time in the application process. The process requires your charity registration number and some documentation about your organisation's activities and governance.

If your charity already has a Microsoft 365 environment but you are not sure whether you are on the right plan or taking full advantage of what you are entitled to, a licence review is worth doing. It is not uncommon for charities to be paying commercial rates for tools they qualified for at a discount — simply because nobody checked when the account was first set up.

For registered UK charities with a turnover under £100,000, LINKBIT offers a dedicated programme that includes Microsoft 365 setup and management as part of a fully managed digital foundation. For charities above that threshold, we provide free eligibility advice — walking you through every Microsoft entitlement and discount your organisation qualifies for, so you are never paying more than you need to.

Ready to find out what your charity is entitled to?

We help registered UK charities get their Microsoft 365 environment set up properly — and make sure they are not leaving money on the table.

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