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Instead of simply helping users find an available room or workspace, the Places Finder and Places app make it easier to see when colleagues plan to be in the office, explore available spaces, and choose locations that support in-person collaboration.

Places Licensing Up Until April 2026

The Places features until now have been split into three, based on the Microsoft 365 licenses assigned to each user. 

1. Core – Anyone with an Microsoft 365 license (there are a couple of exceptions), gets access to the ‘Core’ features of Places.  These include, setting a weekly work plan, viewing colleague plans, the Places card and hybrid RSVP. 
2. Premium – In addition to the core features, those users with Teams Premium licenses get additional functionality, including, Places Finder, booking of individual desks and Places Explorer.  Within these extra features is the well-publicised interactive map/floorplan views of the office. 
3. Copilot – The final set of features are available to those users with a Copilot license and are designed to make scheduling more intelligent.  Extras include scheduling recommendations, automatic adjustments and managing conflicting recurring bookings.

To summarise, to date, ‘non-core’ Places features needed to be licensed per user.

Challenges with the ‘initial’ Places licensing model

The licensing model initially introduced with Places poses some challenges. 

Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, there is the cost. At around £7.70 per user per month, a Teams Premium licence represents a significant investment when compared with the pricing of many third-party workspace booking solutions.

Although Teams Premium includes far more than just Microsoft Places features, organisations that don’t need these additional capabilities were finding it difficult to justify the cost purely to access enhanced Places functionality.

The same goes for Copilot. It’s not, realistically speaking, something you’d purchase purely for the Places features. 

In companies with a lot of staff, licensing everyone for Teams Premium and/or Copilot is going to be costly.

You also had the issue of having just a subset of staff licensed for Teams Premium and using Places Finder, whilst the rest would remain in Room Finder. 

Here you’d have the complexity of those using Room Finder not being able to see or book any individual desks, because bookable desks are only supported in the Places directory – unless you configure desks as workspaces with a capacity of 1 – which is a bit of a ‘hack’. You can read more about Desks vs Workspace resources here>.

What’s Changing On April 1st 2026?

Well, it’s quite fundamental and has the potential to save quite a bit of money for many organisations.  No longer will the Places features be licensed on a user basis. 

As of April 2026, all the Places ‘Premium’ features will be available to all licensed Microsoft 365 users (with a couple of exceptions). 

This will allow everyone in a company to enjoy the same collaboration and booking experience with access to the Places Finder, Places app, maps and so on.

What’s the Catch With the New Places Pricing?

There isn’t a catch as such, however, licensing is still required for certain things. 

Firstly, if you want to be able to book individual desks in advance, these will need licensing.  You’ll also need to license any other type of desk (i.e. walk-up desks or those assigned to individuals) if you want to store analytics about their usage. 

Rooms and workspaces have never needed to be licensed to be booked in advance and that isn’t changing. But bear in mind, you will need to license them if you want to manage them in the Places Directory and assign policies such as auto-release; assuming that it’s not already licensed as a Microsoft Teams Room (MTR), in which case you’re already covered.

The licensing for desks is now called a Teams Shared Space License and each license can account for up to 4 desks.  So if you’re looking at 20 desks you’ll need 5 licences.

If you needed to license a regular meeting room (without a Teams Room capability), then you’ll need a single Teams Shared Space License for that.

What can I do Without any Extra Cost?

The new licensing model in effect means that you can use all the cool things in Microsoft Places without any extra cost, if and only if, you are not interested in any of the advanced features and analytics. 

If you’re purely concerned about seeing where your colleagues intend to be and then being able to book rooms and workspaces, you can enable and use the Places features, including the interactive maps without any extra licensing cost.  The only required investment would be the time to create and configure the resource mailboxes, Places directory and the IMDF maps.

If you want to perform desk bookings in advance and make use of all the extra features and analytics that Places brings, then you will need to audit what you have already licensed for your rooms and purchase new licenses for your desks.

Space type	Book in advance without licensing?	When licensing is required	Licence needed
Individual desks	No	Required to book desks in advance	Teams Shared Space Licence (1 licence per 4 desks)
Walk-up desks	Yes	Required if you want usage analytics	Teams Shared Space Licence
Assigned desks	Yes	Required if you want usage analytics	Teams Shared Space Licence
Meeting rooms	Yes	Required to manage in Places Directory or apply policies (unless already an MTR)	Teams Shared Space Licence (1 per room)
Workspaces / team spaces	Yes	Required to manage in Places Directory or apply policies (unless already licensed as MTR)	Teams Shared Space Licence

Final Thoughts