How Much Does a Microsoft 365 Migration Cost for a Small Business?

A Microsoft 365 migration for a small business carries two separate costs, recurring licenses at $7 to $22 per user per month plus a one-time project fee scoped to mailbox count, data volume, and what you already have running.

The license half you can price yourself in about four minutes flat. Microsoft publishes those numbers. The project half is the part nobody wants to put in writing before they have looked at your environment, and I am going to explain why that is, rather than pretend otherwise.

Two Bills, Not One

Almost every owner who calls me about moving to Microsoft 365 for their business asks one question with two answers buried inside it. What does it cost. Fair question. The trouble sits in the pronoun, because “it” is two things here, and the two behave nothing alike.

Licensing is a subscription. It starts the month you buy seats and it never stops, it scales with headcount, and Microsoft sets the price, not your IT provider. The migration project itself is a one-time engagement, priced on labor, and the labor is determined almost entirely by conditions that already exist in your building before anyone shows up. Confusing those two is how a business ends up comparing a $2,400 quote against a $9,000 quote and assuming somebody is gouging them, when in reality one number included three years of licensing and the other did not.

Make every proposal you receive split the two apart before you compare anything. Ask for it in writing, every time.

What Microsoft 365 Costs Per Seat Right Now

Microsoft raised commercial pricing on July 1, 2026, so any cost guide written before that date is quoting numbers that no longer exist. These are the current published rates for the small business plans, taken from Microsoft’s own Microsoft 365 Business plan comparison in September 2026. All of them cap at 300 users, which is well past where any business I work with sits.

Rates shown are per user per month on an annual subscription, as published by Microsoft in September 2026.

One choice on that page costs businesses real money every year and almost nobody notices it. Those prices assume an annual commitment. Buy the same Business Premium license month to month instead and Microsoft charges $26.40 rather than $22.00, a 20% premium for the right to cancel any month you like. Thirty seats. That flexibility costs $1,584 a year. Nobody budgets for it. Some businesses genuinely want it because they are hiring and firing seasonally, and for them it is money well spent. Most are paying it because nobody asked the question at signup.

Microsoft’s Free Migration Help Starts at 150 Licenses

There is a widely repeated idea that Microsoft will move your data for free through a program called FastTrack. It is true. It is also almost certainly not available to you. Read the fine print once.

Microsoft’s FastTrack eligibility documentation states the requirement plainly. You must purchase at least 150 licenses per tenant to qualify, and within the entire Microsoft 365 Business family, only Business Premium appears on the eligible list at all. A 28-person insurance agency buying 28 Premium seats is not eligible. Neither is a 60-person contractor. The free deployment assistance that shows up in comparison articles is technically available to Business Premium customers, but the 150-license minimum puts it out of reach for most small businesses, and I would rather you learn that here than three weeks into planning a migration around help that is not coming.

So the labor gets bought somewhere. That is the project fee. Somebody bills it.

What Actually Moves the Project Number

When somebody asks me to price a migration cold, my first move is not a number. It is a set of questions about what they are running today, because the starting point drives the cost far more than the headcount does. Here is the counterintuitive part that trips people up. A five-person shop with an ancient on-premises Exchange server, a file share full of mapped drives, and no documented accounts can easily cost more to migrate than a 25-person firm already sitting on Google Workspace with clean data.

• Where the mail lives now. An on-premises Exchange server, a hosted POP or IMAP mailbox from a web host, and Google Workspace are three completely different projects. IMAP migrations in particular can be slower because they are subject to migration-service throttling, connection limits, and constraints on the source mail system.
• Mailbox count and mailbox size pull in opposite directions. Forty small mailboxes move faster than eight enormous ones.
• Shared mailboxes, distribution groups, calendar permissions, resource rooms. All the plumbing that nobody remembers exists until a receptionist cannot book the conference room.
• The file server. This is usually the biggest single variable, and it is covered in more depth in our breakdown of whether to retire your file server for SharePoint. Ten years of nested folders with inherited permissions do not map cleanly onto SharePoint’s sharing model. Somebody has to make decisions about that structure, and those decisions are billable hours whether your provider itemizes them or not.
• Line-of-business software with a hook into email or the file share. QuickBooks. A practice management system. Whatever prints to a network folder at 11pm on a schedule nobody documented.
• How many workstations need Outlook profiles rebuilt, and whether anyone is still on a machine that was slow before the migration started.

Microsoft publishes duration data on this, which is unusual and useful. In their migration performance guidance, onboarding a mailbox under 10 GB from an on-premises server completes in one day at the median and three days at the 90th percentile. Push that mailbox into the 10 to 50 GB band and the median doubles to two days while the 90th percentile stretches to six. Same mailbox count. Very different project. The invoice follows the second number, not the first.

Run the Storage Math Before You Sign Anything

This one catches people. It is pure arithmetic, so you can check it tonight against your own file server.

SharePoint storage is not unlimited and it does not scale the way most owners assume. Per Microsoft’s published SharePoint service limits, a tenant gets 1 TB plus 10 GB for every license purchased. A 25-person office therefore gets about 1.25 TB of SharePoint storage across the tenant. That is plenty for a business running mostly documents and spreadsheets. Comfortably so.

That same 1.25 TB is nothing to a construction firm with fifteen years of job photos, site videos, and drawing sets sitting on a 4 TB volume in a closet. That business is short roughly 2.75 TB on day one. Additional SharePoint storage is bought in 1 GB increments as a separate line item. Nobody wants to discover that during cutover week. Count the actual bytes on your file server first, then decide what genuinely needs to move, because archiving 1.5 TB of finished project media to cheaper storage is a legitimate and much less expensive answer than paying to host it in SharePoint forever.

The Three Costs That Show Up After Cutover

Backup gets the most pushback of anything I say on a first call. Microsoft’s platform keeps your data highly available. It does not keep a backup of it for you in the way a business owner means that word. Microsoft’s own answer to this is a separately billed product, Microsoft 365 Backup, priced at $0.15 per GB per month with restores included at no charge and recovery windows of three months, six months, one year, or two years. A vendor charging you extra for backup is the cleanest possible proof that backup was not already included. Read that twice.

Second, the security features are gated behind license tiers, and that gate moves the math in a way worth checking before you buy. Business Standard runs $14 per user. Add Microsoft Entra ID P1 on top of it for conditional access and you are at $21. Business Premium is $22 and includes Entra ID P1 already, along with Intune and the Defender pieces. One dollar. That is the entire gap between assembling it yourself and buying the plan that was designed to hold all of it, and I would take the plan every time. Not close.

Third is configuration labor, which is the cost that gets left out of quotes most often because it is invisible to the person buying. A migrated tenant is not a secured tenant. If you want a neutral yardstick for how much work sits in that gap, look at the Secure Cloud Business Applications baselines that CISA publishes for Microsoft 365. Federal civilian agencies were directed to implement them, and CISA gives away a free assessment tool called ScubaGear that checks a tenant against them. Read through those policies once and the honest reaction is that a tenant handed to you on the day of cutover, with every Microsoft default still sitting exactly where Microsoft left it, is a starting position rather than a finished one. Not remotely finished.

Why I Will Not Publish a Flat Migration Fee

I could put a number here. It would get more clicks. It would also be wrong for most of the people reading it, and I would spend the first call walking it back. Nobody enjoys that call.

My honest position on pricing a migration is that the diagnosis comes first. What are you running now, what do you actually have in place, and what has to be true when this is finished. Those three answers produce a real number inside an afternoon. Sometimes less. Guessing at them produces a number that either overcharges a simple environment or badly underprices a messy one, and the second outcome is worse for everyone, because the provider who underpriced it starts cutting corners around week three.

What I will commit to in public is the ongoing side, because that one is genuinely predictable. Managed IT through VJNetworks starts at $995 per month, licensing sits on top of that at Microsoft’s published rates, and the migration itself is quoted once as a project after the assessment. Over twenty years of doing this across the Tri-State area, that structure has held up better than any flat fee I have seen advertised. Our 97% client retention is downstream of not surprising people.

If you want the sequence rather than the pricing, I walked through what actually happens during a Microsoft 365 cutover separately, including why we will not hand you a day count either. Same reasoning. Different question.

What Owners Ask Before They Sign Off