Waste patterns
The six ways Microsoft 365 tenants pay for nothing
License waste is not one problem, it is a handful of distinct patterns with distinct causes and distinct detection signals. Each explainer below covers one pattern: why it happens, how to detect it yourself with Graph PowerShell, and how LicenseMeter’s detection rules find and price it automatically.
Disabled account still licensed
The offboarding leak: accountEnabled is false, the licenses stay assigned, the seat keeps billing.
Read the explainer
Licensed but never active
Seats assigned ahead of onboarding or by a group rule where the user never signed in at all.
Read the explainer
Inactive seat
Users whose last sign-in and workload activity are older than your inactivity window, 90 days by default.
Read the explainer
Unassigned paid seats
Purchased seats assigned to nobody: prepaid units minus consumed units, per SKU.
Read the explainer
Copilot seat unused
Copilot add-on seats with no Copilot activity in 60 days, or none ever.
Read the explainer
Licensed guest account
External accounts with userType Guest that hold paid licenses from your tenant.
Read the explainer
What the patterns add up to
The sample tenant of 155 people shows € 2.979,86 a month in waste across 65 findings, every one priced from an editable per-tenant price book prefilled with list-price estimates. The waste calculator turns your own seat count and cost per seat into an estimate, and the PowerShell comparison covers when a script is enough and when it is not.
Find all six patterns in your tenant.
Connect read-only and the free scan checks every pattern on this page against your directory, license assignments, sign-in activity and usage reports.
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