Microsoft Teams often gets bought as "the free bit that comes with Microsoft 365." Calling never was — and five years of quiet UK price rises have made that gap an expensive one.
Teams Phone: cost per user, per month
Teams Phone Standard + UK domestic calling plan, standard published Microsoft list prices, 2021–2026, rounded to the nearest 10p. Illustrative trend based on published price changes.
Ten pounds became eighteen
In 2021, giving one person a Teams-based UK phone line — the Phone Standard licence plus a domestic calling plan — cost around £10 a user, per month, on Microsoft's UK list price. By 2026, that same combination lists at roughly £17.90. That's a 79% rise, and almost none of it arrived as one dramatic announcement. It came in instalments: a currency-linked price adjustment in 2023, a licensing restructure in 2023/24, and a further list price increase moving into 2025/26 — each one small enough to wave through at renewal, each one compounding on the last.
The E3 licence that quietly got smaller
A lot of UK businesses standardised on Microsoft 365 E3 partly because it seemed to include "everything," Teams client included. That changed. Following EU regulatory pressure, Microsoft unbundled Teams from the E1/E3/E5 suites, so the client itself now carries its own line item — before calling is even switched on. Meanwhile, plenty of what E3 and E5 customers already pay for goes largely unused: most staff join a handful of Teams calls a week and never touch the rest of what the licence includes.
None of this is a knock on Microsoft
To be clear, this isn't personal against Microsoft. Teams is a genuinely capable product, and Microsoft has poured serious, sustained investment into it — calling features, AI-assisted meetings, device support, and tighter integration across the wider Microsoft 365 stack. The issue isn't quality, it's usage. Before the next renewal, it's worth asking a blunt question: how much of what you're licensed for do the people using Teams every day actually touch? If the honest answer is "not much," you may be paying premium rates for a version of Teams your business isn't really using.
Paying full price for a phone some people barely use — and can't use at all
Per-user licensing assumes every seat needs the same thing. In practice, some staff make almost no external calls and would manage fine on far less than a full calling licence. Others — anyone based in a basement, a warehouse, or a signal-shadowed corner of a site — can't rely on Teams at all, because there's no dependable Wi-Fi or mobile signal to run it on. Those people still need a physical desk phone or DECT handset, wired to a line that has nothing to do with Microsoft. So the real bill isn't just the rising Teams number on its own — it's Teams for the desks that can use it, plus hardware and lines for the ones that can't, priced separately and rarely reviewed together.
The licence is only half the bill
Every figure above is just the Microsoft licence — the right to make and receive calls in Teams. Actually connecting those calls to a real landline or mobile number, out on the UK phone network, is a separate cost again, bought one of three ways:
- Calling Plans — Microsoft's own PSTN service, bundled minutes bought straight from Microsoft on top of the Phone Standard licence. Simplest to set up, but it's Microsoft's own metered rates, and the domestic add-on alone commonly runs another £4.80–£6.00 a user, per month, in the UK — on top of everything already covered above.
- Operator Connect — a third-party carrier plugs directly into Microsoft's cloud, so there's no on-site hardware to run. The carrier bills you separately from Microsoft, on its own contract and its own rates — often cheaper per minute at any real volume, but it's a second invoice, from a second supplier, that rarely gets checked against the first.
- Direct Routing — you connect your own carrier and a session border controller (physical or "as a service") into Teams. Frequently the cheapest per-minute option, especially if a carrier contract is already in place, but it adds the cost of that hardware or platform, plus someone to keep it patched and secure.
None of these is right or wrong — each suits a different size and shape of business. But whichever one gets chosen sits on top of the per-user licence, on a different bill, often bought at a different time by a different person. Add licensing and connectivity together, rather than reviewing them separately, and the true monthly cost of "just giving someone a phone" is usually a good deal higher than the licence price alone suggests.
Why it creeps up on you
None of these changes needed sign-off from most finance teams — they landed as routine renewal terms, not projects. That's exactly why the number is worth checking against what your business actually uses, rather than what got bought three renewals ago.