Teams pay as you go zone 2: the funding step

What it is

A Microsoft Calling Plan without an included allowance. Microsoft is still the carrier and incoming minutes are still unlimited, but no outgoing minutes come with the licence and every outbound call is charged on the minutes used.

Who it is for

Users who answer far more than they dial, and estates where outbound volume is unpredictable enough that buying an allowance is guesswork. Microsoft frames the decision the same way, asking whether users who do not make a significant number of outgoing calls would be better served by pay as you go.

Zones follow the user

Pay as you go is sold as three separate licences, and which applies is decided by where the user is located.

Zone 2, this licence, covers users in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Zone 1 covers users in the United States and Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Mexico has its own plan, which Microsoft notes cannot be purchased by customers in the United States or Puerto Rico. Users in any other market are not covered by a pay as you go plan.

Funding, and why the usual explanation is wrong through a partner

Microsoft's end customer documentation describes two routes, post usage billing under a Microsoft Customer Agreement and Communications Credits under a Microsoft Online Subscription Agreement. Neither is the path for a subscription transacted through the Cloud Solution Provider programme, and Microsoft says so plainly: communication credits were not offered in Partner Center.

The CSP mechanism is telco pay as you go overage, and every point below is stated by Microsoft in its Partner Center documentation on telco pay as you go overage in new commerce.

• An Azure plan subscription is a prerequisite to enable the overage. Microsoft notes that where none exists, an administrator can create one while activating it.
• Only admin agents on the transacting partner account can enable overage, and Microsoft states that indirect resellers need to have their indirect provider's admin agents enable it. That is a lead time on somebody else's calendar rather than a checkbox.
• Overage is on or off for all telco services provisioned on the customer's tenant, and Microsoft states this applies across multiple partners: the partner who first enabled it controls the setting, and Microsoft describes moving it as requiring the customer and both partners to agree first.
• Microsoft lists Granular Delegated Admin Privileges over the customer's Azure subscription as a setup requirement, and names Conditional Access and Azure Policy settings on the customer tenant as things that can block the alignment.

Until this is done the licence places no calls. Settle it before the go live date rather than on it. Checked against Microsoft's documentation on 2026-08-05.

One inherited condition

Where Communications Credits already exist with a positive balance, Microsoft states that billing draws them down first, and that the auto recharge flag most customers have enabled must be disabled or the balance refills itself and the tenant never moves to the consumption meter.

The entitlement

The user must be licensed for Teams Phone. Microsoft states that where any Microsoft 365 E5 licence is used it is not necessary also to assign the standalone Teams Phone Standard licence, so an E5 tenant already has it. Otherwise buy it before the Calling Plan, or buy a Teams Phone with pay as you go bundle in one step.

Where a user cannot be located

Microsoft's availability page for Malta answers no to whether Calling Plans can be purchased there. Communications Credits are available in Malta, which misleads: credits are a way of paying for minutes, not a licence to place calls, so their availability does not make a Calling Plan available. Microsoft documents four PSTN connectivity models, and of those Direct Routing works in any country or region, while Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile depend on a participating operator serving the market.

When it fits

When outbound use per user sits well below a domestic allowance, when the user population is seasonal, or when a deployment is new and real call volume is unknown. Pay as you go also reaches international destinations, charged per minute, so it can serve occasional international callers without an included international allowance. Compare the published per destination rates against a plan before assuming either is cheaper.