ROI calculator
Microsoft 365 license waste calculator
Put in your paid seat count, your monthly cost per seat and a waste share you consider plausible, and see what that assumption costs per month and per year. The estimate runs entirely in your browser, and a free read-only scan replaces it with your tenant’s real number.
Use the paid seat count from your renewal, billing export or admin center.
Default uses this app's Microsoft 365 E3 list-price estimate. Replace it with your blended monthly cost if procurement has one.
Start with a conservative pre-scan assumption. The sample tenant is 43 percent, but your free scan replaces this with tenant data.
At 250 seats the Starter plan is € 79/month. Your assumed waste is 9,3x that monthly plan cost.
What typically drives license waste
The waste share you pick above is an assumption, but the mechanisms behind it are concrete. These are the patterns LicenseMeter’s detection rules look for in real tenants:
Offboarding leaks
An account gets disabled in Entra ID, but its licenses stay assigned. The seat keeps billing every month until someone notices. This is the classic leak: leavers accumulate quietly, one or two per departure.
Seats that never started
Licenses assigned ahead of onboarding, for a project that fizzled, or by an over-broad group rule. The user never signs in and never touches a workload, yet the seat is paid from day one.
Seats that went quiet
People change roles, tools change, and a licensed account stops signing in to Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams. Without a last-activity check across those workloads, the seat looks fine in the admin center.
Shelfware, overlaps and add-ons
Purchased seats that were never assigned to anyone, suites paid alongside standalone plans that duplicate them, Copilot add-ons nobody uses, and paid licenses sitting on guest accounts. None of this shows up in a headcount comparison.
How the calculator works
Seats times monthly cost per seat times your assumed waste share: no more, no less. The math runs in integer cents, the annual figure is twelve times the monthly one, and the plan comparison uses the same published tiers as the pricing page, including the break-even seat count at which a plan would pay for itself under your assumption. Above 2.500 seats the estimate still runs, but published pricing hands over to a tenant-specific conversation. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.
From assumption to detection
A scan replaces the slider with findings: LicenseMeter joins directory data, license assignments, sign-in activity and usage reports read-only, then prices every wasted seat from an editable price book prefilled with list-price estimates, because there is no Microsoft API for your negotiated prices. The sample tenant of 155 people shows € 2.979,86 a month across 65 findings, each with the account, the rule and the monthly cost attached.
Every finding exports to CSV for finance, and IT gets a generated PowerShell remediation script to review and run. LicenseMeter itself never writes to your tenant.
Stop estimating. See your number.
Connect read-only and the free scan replaces every assumption on this page with real tenant data, priced per seat and per month.
After the free scan, 14 days of full monitoring, free. No credit card, read-only access.