AI Builder Credits Are Ending: The 1 November 2026 Deadline

AI Builder credits ending is a real, dated licensing change, not a rumour or a third-party forecast. Microsoft’s own documentation lays out an exact calendar, and the date that matters most for anyone currently running AI Builder flows on a premium licence is 1 November 2026, when seeded credits disappear entirely.

This covers the precise timeline, what actually happens to a flow once its credits run out, the order two different currencies get spent in, and a specific five-day blind spot in how overage gets detected that’s worth planning around.

The Exact Timeline

Microsoft’s own detailed calendar splits this into two customer groups, add-on customers and seeded customers, since they’re affected differently and on slightly different terms.

1 November 2025: sales stop, nothing else changes yet

New customers without an active AI Builder capacity add-on can no longer purchase one. Anyone already using AI Builder, whether through an add-on or seeded credits in a premium licence, saw no change at all on this date and could continue exactly as before.

1 November 2026: the actual cutoff

Two things happen simultaneously. Seeded AI Builder credits, the ones bundled into licences like Power Automate Premium, are removed entirely. Separately, existing capacity add-ons reach end of life: customers with an active add-on can keep using credits tied to it, but can no longer renew it or purchase a new one.

The one exception: contracts already running

Microsoft states it will honour AI Builder entitlements, both add-on and seeded, for contracts that started prior to 1 November 2025, for the full duration of that agreement. If your contract predates that cutoff, its own terms govern rather than the general calendar above.

Which Currency Gets Spent First

For anyone with both currencies available in an environment during the transition period, Microsoft documents a specific, fixed order: AI Builder credits are consumed first. Only once they’re absent or exhausted does the system attempt to use Copilot Credits instead.

There is no automatic conversion between the two. Microsoft states this directly: to replace AI Builder credits as they progressively end, customers are invited to purchase Copilot Credits separately, rather than expecting unused AI Builder capacity to convert into the new currency on its own.

The Five Day Blind Spot

Separate from the licensing transition, Microsoft documents an operational detail worth knowing regardless of which currency you’re running on: overage detection has a real, acknowledged lag.

AI Builder credit consumption is computed regularly, ideally on a daily basis, but Microsoft states this can be delayed up to five or more days. If the computation doesn’t happen for multiple days, the system relies on the last computation it does have, which can indicate no overage even if consumption has actually run well past the available credits.

The consequence: flows can keep running and consuming credits during that gap, producing what Microsoft describes as important overage. That overage is never billed and only affects the current environment, which sounds reassuring until you consider the other side of it: since usage doesn’t roll over between months either, a flow that ran freely during an undetected overage gap and then gets blocked once computation catches up can interrupt a business process with no advance warning at all.

What This Actually Costs, in Real Numbers

Microsoft’s published rate table gives exact figures worth having on hand when estimating what a Copilot Credit-based future costs compared to today’s seeded allowance.

One AI Builder add-on unit provides 1 million credits a month for $500 on the yearly prepaid Tier 1 rate, and the maximum credits any single tenant can hold is 1 million, except Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations specifically, which is capped at 20,000. Against these rates, a Power Automate Premium licence’s 5,000 seeded credits a month covers roughly 5,000 pages of OCR, but only around 50 pages of custom document processing at 100 credits each, a gap worth checking against your own actual workload before assuming seeded capacity was ever generous enough for what you’re running.

What to Actually Do Before 1 November 2026

Given the exact calendar and the cost figures above, a specific sequence of actions makes the transition manageable rather than something that surfaces as a sudden outage the week seeded credits disappear.

Audit current AI Builder consumption now

Check actual monthly usage against the 5,000 credits a Power Automate Premium licence seeds, broken down by which operations are consuming it. A flow doing custom document processing at 100 credits a page will exhaust that allowance dramatically faster than one doing plain OCR at 3 credits a page, and knowing which operations you actually run determines how much Copilot Credit capacity to plan for.

Price out Copilot Credits against your actual usage, not the seeded number

Seeded credits were a fixed monthly allowance regardless of actual need. Copilot Credits are purchased capacity, which means this is the moment to size the purchase against real historical consumption rather than simply trying to replace 5,000 credits with an equivalent Copilot Credit amount, since the conversion between the two currencies isn’t one-to-one.

Set up consumption monitoring before the deadline, not after

Given the documented five-day-or-more detection lag, waiting until credits are already gone to start watching consumption means finding out about a problem well after it started. Configuring the Power Platform admin center’s usage tracking now, while seeded credits still provide a safety margin, is the difference between catching an issue early and discovering it as a blocked production flow.

Where to Confirm This Against Microsoft’s Live Documentation

Every date, rate and mechanism in this article traces back to Microsoft’s own AI Builder documentation, specifically the pages covering the end of AI Builder credits and the overall licensing overview. Given the size of the change involved, an entire billing currency being retired, checking those pages directly before making a purchasing decision is worth doing rather than relying on any single secondary summary, this one included.

Licensing pages of this kind are also exactly the sort Microsoft revises as a transition date approaches, sometimes adjusting timelines or adding transitional provisions in response to customer feedback. Revisiting the source close to any purchasing or budgeting decision, rather than relying on a snapshot taken months earlier, is the safer habit for a change of this scale.

Common Questions

The organisations best positioned for this transition are the ones treating it as a planned migration with a fixed deadline, not a surprise that arrives with the next invoice. Everything documented here is public, dated, and has been for some time; the risk isn’t that Microsoft hasn’t explained the change, it’s that most Power Automate users have no reason to have gone looking for it.

A calendar reminder set for several months before 1 November 2026, rather than the date itself, is the single cheapest safeguard available against this transition catching an active automation off guard.

The Short Version