Microsoft SPLA Pricing 2026: What Changed and How to Manage the Impact

What Changed in January 2026

Microsoft announced SPLA price increases for a specific set of on-premises server products, effective for reporting months beginning January 1, 2026. The increase is approximately 10% on the SPLA list rates for affected products, subject to regional foreign exchange adjustments that may result in higher or lower effective changes in non-USD markets.

The products subject to the January 2026 increase include Exchange Server (Standard and Enterprise SAL tiers), SharePoint Server (Standard and Enterprise SAL tiers), Skype for Business Server (Standard and Enterprise SAL tiers), and certain legacy Dynamics ERP and CRM products including on-premises versions of Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP, and legacy Dynamics CRM.

Windows Server and SQL Server SPLA rates were explicitly excluded from this round of increases. Providers whose SPLA portfolio consists predominantly of Windows Server and SQL Server hosting — the core infrastructure stack for most traditional hosting providers — are largely insulated from the January 2026 change. The impact falls most heavily on providers who have built hosted email, collaboration, or legacy ERP services on the affected products.

Why Microsoft Increased These Specific Products

The products affected by the 2026 increase share a common characteristic: they are on-premises versions of products where Microsoft's strategic priority is migration to cloud equivalents. Hosted Exchange on-premises is the legacy alternative to Exchange Online. Hosted SharePoint on-premises is the legacy alternative to SharePoint Online. Making the on-premises SPLA hosting more expensive while the cloud CSP version remains at or below the pre-increase on-premises cost creates a commercial incentive for providers to migrate their customers to M365 cloud services delivered through CSP.

This is consistent with Microsoft's broader strategy of using licensing economics to drive the adoption of its cloud services. The same dynamic played out in the EA market where Microsoft raised on-premises server product prices while holding cloud subscription rates flat — and it is now being applied within the SPLA programme.

How SPLA Pricing Works: The Model Explained

Understanding how SPLA rates are structured is essential before assessing the impact of the January 2026 changes. SPLA pricing is not public — there is no published rate card equivalent to Microsoft's standard volume licensing price list. SPLA rates are agreed between Microsoft and its authorised resellers (LARs and SPLA distributors), and the rate that an individual SPLA licensee pays is the reseller's cost plus the reseller's margin.

This means two SPLA licensees with identical product portfolios may be paying materially different monthly costs depending on their reseller relationship and the negotiated terms at the reseller level. Reseller competition in the SPLA channel is limited, and many providers remain on original SPLA reseller relationships without having assessed whether more favourable terms are available. The January 2026 increase is an appropriate moment to evaluate reseller terms as part of the overall cost management response.

SAL-Based Product Pricing

For Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, and legacy Dynamics — the products affected by the January 2026 increase — SPLA pricing is based on the Subscriber Access License (SAL) model. The SAL rate is a monthly per-user or per-device charge. The total monthly SPLA cost for an Exchange hosting service is: (number of active Exchange SALs reported in the month) × (monthly SAL rate) × (Standard or Enterprise SAL tier).

A 10% increase in the SAL rate translates directly to a 10% increase in the SPLA cost for every Exchange, SharePoint, or affected Dynamics customer. For a provider with 10,000 hosted Exchange mailboxes, a $0.50 per-user per-month SAL rate increase translates to $5,000 per month or $60,000 per year in additional SPLA cost — before considering any reseller markup.

Processor and Core-Based Product Pricing

Windows Server and SQL Server — which were not subject to the January 2026 increase — are priced on a per-processor or per-core basis. The monthly cost is: (number of physical processors or cores running the software) × (monthly processor or core rate). Because these products are priced on hardware configuration rather than user count, the monthly cost is more stable and predictable for providers with fixed infrastructure, but scales rapidly when server capacity is added.

Product-by-Product Impact Analysis

Hosted Exchange Providers

Exchange hosting is the service category most immediately affected by the January 2026 increase. Providers offering hosted Exchange mailbox services — whether as a standalone hosted email product or as part of a broader hosted collaboration suite — face a direct 10% increase in their SPLA cost basis for every Exchange SAL reported from January 2026 forward.

The commercial challenge is compounded by competitive dynamics. Many hosted Exchange customers are already evaluating or in the process of migrating to Exchange Online (delivered as part of Microsoft 365 or as a standalone Exchange Online plan through CSP). A 10% increase in the cost of the on-premises hosted alternative accelerates the economics of cloud migration in favour of Exchange Online. Providers who are not proactively positioning a CSP-based Exchange Online alternative risk losing customers to Microsoft's own cloud service rather than benefiting from the migration.

The strategic options for Exchange hosting providers are: pass through the increase to customers and accept potential churn, absorb the increase in margin, or actively develop and sell a CSP-based Exchange Online alternative that replaces the on-premises hosted service. Most providers will pursue some combination of the first and third options — protecting margin by moving existing customers toward cloud while absorbing the increase for customers who prefer on-premises hosting until their natural renewal point.

Hosted SharePoint Providers

SharePoint hosting has been in secular decline as SharePoint Online (included in Microsoft 365 E1, E3, E5, and E7) has become the default deployment for most enterprise customers. The January 2026 price increase further weakens the economics of on-premises SharePoint hosting relative to SharePoint Online. Providers with significant hosted SharePoint deployments should accelerate their SharePoint Online migration roadmap for existing customers rather than absorbing ongoing SPLA cost increases for a product category in structural decline.

Legacy Dynamics Hosting

On-premises Dynamics hosting — predominantly Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP, and legacy Dynamics CRM — faces both the January 2026 SPLA price increase and the broader shift toward Dynamics 365 cloud applications. Microsoft has not announced an end-of-life timeline for the SPLA eligibility of legacy Dynamics products, but the pricing trajectory and the absence of new feature development for these products makes the migration to Dynamics 365 cloud a commercial inevitability rather than a strategic choice.

For providers hosting legacy Dynamics on behalf of customers, the January 2026 increase should trigger a customer-by-customer evaluation of migration readiness for Dynamics 365. Our Microsoft licensing advisory team supports this evaluation, including the CSP commercial modelling and customer transition planning.

What Stayed Flat: Windows Server and SQL Server

The decision to hold Windows Server and SQL Server SPLA rates flat in January 2026 reflects their central role in the hosting infrastructure that Microsoft's cloud migration strategy depends on. Every Azure VM running Windows Server, every SQL Server database migrating to SQL Azure, and every Windows application being modernised as an Azure-hosted service represents a Windows Server or SQL Server workload that began its lifecycle in a SPLA-licensed on-premises or co-located environment.

Microsoft's pricing restraint on Windows Server and SQL Server SPLA is partly strategic: aggressive SPLA price increases for these products would create a commercial incentive for providers to migrate customer infrastructure away from Windows Server toward Linux-based alternatives, which Microsoft does not want. Keeping SPLA Windows Server economically competitive supports the retention of the Windows-based infrastructure estate that ultimately drives Azure migration revenue.

Reseller Rate Negotiation: Often Overlooked

Because SPLA rates are not public, many hosting providers accept their current reseller rates without challenge, treating SPLA as a pass-through cost where the only variable is Microsoft's list price. This is a mistake. SPLA resellers have commercial discretion to offer different rates to different customers based on volume, relationship tenure, and competitive dynamics. The January 2026 increase is a natural trigger for a reseller rate review.

Engaging an independent advisor to benchmark your current SPLA reseller terms against available alternatives — and to conduct a structured competitive conversation with one or more alternative resellers — typically identifies 5 to 15 percent savings opportunities at the reseller margin level. For a provider paying $50,000 per month in SPLA fees, a 10 percent reseller rate improvement saves $60,000 per year: equivalent to offsetting the entire impact of the January 2026 list price increase for most portfolios.

This exercise requires independence. Your current SPLA reseller has no incentive to tell you their rates are negotiable. An external advisor who regularly navigates the SPLA reseller market on behalf of multiple clients has the benchmark data and the leverage to drive a commercially meaningful result.

CSP Migration as a Pricing Response

For Exchange and SharePoint hosting, the most commercially durable response to the January 2026 SPLA increase is accelerating the migration of hosted services to CSP-delivered Microsoft 365. Exchange Online is available through CSP at rates that, for most user segments, are comparable to or below the post-increase SPLA cost for hosted Exchange on-premises, without the infrastructure management overhead of on-premises server deployment.

Providers who transition hosted Exchange and SharePoint customers to CSP-delivered Microsoft 365 subscriptions eliminate their SPLA exposure for those services entirely, improve the service quality proposition (cloud services receive continuous feature updates that on-premises versions do not), and establish a CSP revenue stream that grows with the Microsoft 365 footprint. For a detailed migration framework see our SPLA to CSP migration guide.