Microsoft turns shared 1TB allowances into pooled storage for 365 subscribers

Microsoft 365 Family, Premium and Pro users will lose individual storage allowances as the company moves to shared pools, potentially leaving heavy users facing higher costs.

Microsoft is changing the way its consumer and small-business Microsoft 365 subscriptions handle cloud storage and AI access, moving away from per-person allowances towards shared pools. The update affects Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium and Pro plans, and Microsoft says the revised structure is designed to give customers “more flexibility with their AI and cloud storage benefits”. In practice, the effect will vary sharply depending on how heavily a household or business uses OneDrive.

The biggest change concerns storage. Microsoft support says Microsoft 365 Family and Premium will now include 2 TB of shared cloud storage, while Microsoft 365 Pro will include 5 TB. Under the old structure, Family, Premium and Pro subscribers could rely on a 1 TB allowance for each member, which meant a fully used Family plan could total 6 TB across six accounts. The company says the files in each account remain private even when storage is shared, but the quota will now be drawn from one communal pool rather than from individual allowances.

That shift could be costly for families or groups already using more than 2 TB in total. ZDNET notes that Microsoft’s current Family plan costs about $130 a year, while extra OneDrive storage is priced in 1 TB increments at $10 a month. That means households which have built workflows around the former 1 TB-per-person model may face a choice between trimming data, reorganising files or paying substantially more. Microsoft’s own support pages say the changes begin for new and upgraded subscriptions on October 8, 2026, while existing subscribers move over at their first renewal on or after May 2, 2027.

The AI changes are less severe, though still important. At present, Copilot usage credits are tied to the subscription owner, but Microsoft says the new model will allow family members to share a single AI allowance, with the owner able to manage access for younger users. Premium and Pro subscribers will also be able to buy additional AI usage credits. That makes the package more flexible, but it also brings the plan structure closer to the way rivals already bundle storage and AI features.

Microsoft’s move appears to be part housekeeping and part restraint. ZDNET suggests the company is trying to limit heavy storage abuse by a minority of power users who have treated Microsoft 365 Family as a cheap way to assemble multi-terabyte personal archives. The company has taken a similar approach before: in 2014, it promised unlimited OneDrive storage to Office 365 customers, only to withdraw that offer a year later after some users consumed vast amounts of capacity. In that sense, the latest revision is less a surprise than a correction, but it will still be unwelcome for subscribers who joined on the expectation of generous per-user limits.

For most customers, the change may pass unnoticed. Microsoft’s own documentation indicates that Microsoft 365 has long been pitched as a bundle of Office apps, security features and cloud storage for use across devices, and many households are unlikely to hit the new shared ceiling. But for loyal subscribers who have spent years staying within the old 1 TB-per-user framework, the revised model represents a meaningful reduction in headroom. The practical consequence is that Microsoft is no longer selling storage as a set of individual entitlements; it is selling a pooled resource, and the customers who relied most on the old arrangement will feel the difference first.