Office Support / Office 365 Admin / Billing
Switch to a different Office 365 for business plan
If your business needs change, or if there are Office 365 features you want to take advantage of that aren’t available in your current plan, you might be able to switch some or all of your users from your current plan to a different plan.
What's supported:
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Switching between Office 365 for business plans.
Tip These are the plans listed in tables 2-4 of the Business plans you can switch to in Office 365 article. -
Switching from Office 365 Small Business, Small Business Premium, or Midsize Business to an Office 365 for business plan.
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Switching between Office 365 Education plans.
What's not supported:
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Switching between Office 365 Small Business, Small Business Premium, or Midsize Business plans.
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Switching from Office 365 for home subscriptions, such as Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal, and Office 365 University to an Office 365 for business plan or vice versa. If you want to move to an Office 365 for business subscription, you’ll need to buy the subscription that you want, create your user accounts for that subscription, and then manually copy your OneDrive files to the new subscription.
If you want to switch between Office 365 for home subscriptions, see Switch to a different Office 365 for home plan.
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Switching from an Office 365 for business subscription to an Office 365 for home subscriptions, such as Office 365 Home, Office 365 Personal, and Office 365 University.
The easiest way to switch plans is to use the switch plans wizard that’s built into the Office 365 admin center. However, using the switch plans wizard isn’t supported in all situations. In which case you might be able to switch plans manually. This article helps you chose the right path for your situation.
The switch plans wizard is built into the Office 365 admin center of all Office 365 for business and enterprise subscriptions, as well as Office 365 Small Business, Small Business Premium, and Midsize Business subscriptions. The switch plans wizard does the following:
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Leads you through the process of buying a plan that you can switch your current plan to.
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Reassigns all user licenses from the plan you’re switching from to the plan you’re switching to.
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Cancels your old plan.
Switching plans manually means that you’re completing the following separate procedures instead of using the switch plans wizard. The procedures are:
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Buy licenses for the subscription you’re switching users to.
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Verify the subscription is ready to switch users to.
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Reassign user licenses
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Remove unneeded licenses from the subscription you’re switching from.
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Cancel the original subscription (if switching all users).
The switch plans wizard supports switching all users from one subscription to another. It doesn’t support switching only some of the users. If you want to switch only some of your users to a different subscription, you might be able to switch them manually. We’ll discuss this more, later in this article.
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Sign in to Office 365 with your work or school account as a global admin. Learn how to sign in.
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Select the app launcher icon
in the upper-left and choose Admin.
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Go to the Subscriptions page:
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Choose Billing > Subscriptions or
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Under billing select View and edit subscriptions. (for Office 365 small and midsized business subscriptions that were purchased through a partner.)
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On the Subscriptions page, select the plan you want to switch from.
The following pictures show how a subscription looks when the switch plans wizard is available and when it isn’t available.
Available
Not available
Note If you don’t see the Switch plans button, your plan can't be switched using the Switch plans wizard. -
If you see the No switch plans message, you can position your mouse over the info icon and a message describing the reason that the wizard is not available is displayed.
There are several reasons why the switch plans wizard might be unavailable. Most of them are due to temporary issues or issues that you can resolve. See the Why can't I switch plans? article for more information.
If the switch plans wizard is available, the next step is to determine if you can switch your current plan to the one that you want. The switch plans wizard limits the plans that you can switch to, based on the services in your current plan. The wizard will only switch to a plan that has the same data-related services, such as Exchange Online or SharePoint Online, or to a higher version of them. This ensures that users don’t lose data related to those services during the switch.
The switch plans wizard also restricts the plans you can switch between to ensure that you don’t switch to a plan with a lesser service, which would cause a loss of functionality. For example, the switch plans wizard won’t switch from Office 365 Enterprise E4 (which has Skype for Business Online Plan 3) to Office 365 Enterprise E3 (which has Skype for Business Online Plan 2).
The Business plans you can switch to in Office 365 article lists the subscriptions you can switch between using the switch plans wizard as well as the subscriptions you can switch to manually.
The following table shows the recommended way to switch users to a different plan.
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I want to |
Use this article |
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