Microsoft split Teams pricing from Office in the EU

A suite split into two SKUs

On 31 August 2023, Microsoft's Nanna-Louise Linde announced that, in the European Economic Area and Switzerland, Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites would be offered without Teams at a lower price, effective 1 October 2023, alongside suites that keep it. The announcement followed the European Commission opening a formal investigation the previous month into Teams' bundling with Microsoft's productivity suites. The suite without Teams was priced about €2 a month, or €24 a year, below the bundle; standalone Teams was offered separately at around €5 a month, or €60 a year, for enterprise customers, with small-business and frontline-worker suites keeping a similar choice.

Who it affects, and how the split works

The change targeted EEA and Switzerland-based buyers of Microsoft 365 and Office 365. Mechanically, Microsoft did not remove Teams from its suites; it split each affected suite into two SKUs, with and without Teams, and priced the difference. A buyer keeps access to Teams if wanted, just licensed and billed as a distinct line rather than bundled by default.

The friction: a first step, not a settlement

The 2023 move was explicitly framed around two goals: letting customers choose a cheaper suite without Teams, and improving interoperability between rival collaboration tools and Microsoft's suites. It did not close the underlying investigation. Microsoft's own EU policy blog shows that, by 16 May 2025, the European Commission had still not concluded its inquiry and was market-testing new commitments from Microsoft, this time proposing to guarantee minimum price gaps between with- and without-Teams suites for seven years, described as building on, and going beyond, the voluntary 2023 unbundling. That timeline matters for a buyer: the 2023 announcement was a real, dated change to pricing and packaging, but it was not, on Microsoft's own later account, sufficient to resolve the competition question that prompted it.

• Is your current Microsoft 365 quote the with-Teams or without-Teams SKU, and is the price gap close to the 2023 figures?
• Would a competing chat tool, combined with the discount, cost less overall than keeping Teams bundled?
• Has the underlying EU competition matter been formally closed, or is it still under review at your renewal date?

Unbundling a product from a suite changes what a buyer can choose, but a single announcement rarely ends the regulatory process that produced it. This one visibly did not.