If you thought disabling auto-renewal was enough to prevent a Microsoft CSP subscription from rolling over automatically, you are mistaken. From 1 April 2026, the familiar thirty-day grace period is gone. Expired subscriptions now automatically move to Extended Service Time, a more expensive monthly rate with a three percent surcharge. What you need to know and how to avoid it.
Many organisations manage their Microsoft licences through the Cloud Solution Provider programme, or CSP. Until recently the process for not renewing a subscription was relatively comfortable: if auto-renewal was off and no renewal order was placed, you had thirty days before anything changed. That provides space to decide, renegotiate or switch.
Those thirty days are gone from 1 April 2026. Microsoft has fundamentally changed the rules. Anyone who has disabled auto-renewal and forgets to act in time no longer ends up in a neutral holding state but is automatically moved to Extended Service Time, or EST. And that is significantly more expensive.
Extended Service Time is a transitional arrangement Microsoft introduced to prevent businesses from suddenly losing access to services when a subscription expires without a replacement order in place. It sounds customer-friendly, and in some ways it is: your employees can keep working without interruption.
But EST comes at a price. Billing switches from the annual rate to the monthly rate, which is typically around twenty percent higher than the annual equivalent. On top of that comes a three percent surcharge. An organisation that ends up on EST and lets it run for a few months without taking action pays significantly more than necessary.
The biggest risk is not in technical continuity but in unexpected costs. Take a subscription for fifty users on Microsoft 365 Business Premium. At an annual rate of around €22 per user per month, on EST you quickly pay €26 or more, plus the three percent surcharge. Over three months that adds up to hundreds of euros in unnecessary spending, purely because the renewal date was not on the radar in time.
A second risk is that organisations with multiple subscriptions and different expiry dates lose oversight. When each subscription's expiry date has to be monitored separately, the chance of missing a date increases.
The first step is visibility. Make sure you have a complete overview of all your active CSP subscriptions, including the expiry date, the number of licences and the current auto-renewal setting. If you work with a Microsoft partner, ask for an up-to-date overview and confirm which subscriptions expire on which date.
The second step is a conscious choice per subscription. If you want to renew, it is wise to leave auto-renewal on or place a renewal order in good time. If you do not want to renew, communicate this to your partner well before the expiry date so that no unintended transition to EST takes place.
The third step is monitoring. Set a recurring reminder in your calendar for thirty days before the expiry date of each subscription. That gives you the space to decide in time without acting under pressure.
Do you work with Zarioh as your Microsoft partner? We proactively maintain an overview of your licence portfolio and inform you well in advance of upcoming expiry dates. Have questions about your current subscriptions or want to know whether you have already moved to EST? Get in touch.
