Power BI pricing is a freemium model. Power BI Desktop, the Windows app where reports are built, is completely free. The Power BI service has a free tier for personal use, but sharing reports with colleagues needs a paid per-user licence. Power BI Pro costs £10.80 per user per month; Premium Per User costs £18.50.
What you get for free
A useful amount of Power BI costs nothing at all. Two things are genuinely free:
- Power BI Desktop: the free Windows application where reports are built. It is the full product, not a trial: connect to data, model it and design reports with no time limit and no feature lock.
- A free account: signing in to the Power BI service costs nothing and needs no credit card. It gives you a personal workspace to save and view your own reports.
So one person, working on their own, can build genuinely useful reports without paying anything. The free account is enough for personal analysis and for learning the tool properly.
Where the cost comes in: sharing
The catch is collaboration. The free tier lets you build reports and view your own work, but it does not let you share reports with other people. That is the same split that separates Power BI Desktop from the Power BI service: the moment a report needs to reach colleagues, someone needs a paid licence.
This is the line Microsoft's licensing documentation draws: a free licence covers personal use, while publishing to a shared workspace and sending reports to colleagues is a paid feature. Power BI is free to learn and free to build with; you pay when you want to put your work in front of an audience.
What the paid licences cost
When you do need to pay, there are two per-user licences. Microsoft's Power BI pricing page sets them out:
- Power BI Pro: £10.80 per user per month, billed annually. This is the standard licence for publishing and sharing reports; it is what most business users need.
- Power BI Premium Per User: £18.50 per user per month, billed annually. This adds enterprise-scale features such as larger datasets and more frequent refreshes.
Both prices exclude VAT. Larger organisations can instead buy Microsoft Fabric capacity, which is priced at the organisation level rather than per user. For most teams starting out, Power BI Pro is the figure to plan around. For how the two paid tiers compare, see Power BI Pro vs Premium.
Is it free for learning or personal use?
Yes. This is the part worth knowing if you are weighing up Power BI. Because Power BI Desktop is free and a personal workspace costs nothing, you can learn the tool, build a portfolio of reports and get genuinely good at it without spending a penny.
That makes Power BI unusually low-risk to pick up. You only reach a paid licence once you are sharing work inside a business, by which point the tool has already proved its worth to you. If you would rather shorten the self-taught stage, our Power BI training buyer's guide sets out how to choose a UK course that gets you there faster.
Free to learn, worth learning well Power BI costing nothing to start means you can build real skills before you spend anything. When you want to move from self-taught to genuinely confident, our two-day, hands-on Power BI Masterclass gets you there faster.
