EA or CSP in 2026? Microsoft may decide before you do

Over the past few years Microsoft has steadily moved smaller EA customers towards CSP, or towards a direct agreement called MCA-E, the Microsoft Customer Agreement for Enterprise. There is no published cutoff you can check yourself. Whether it reaches you depends on your size, your market and your setup. The point is to find out before your renewal window opens, not in the middle of it.

That is not bad news in itself. It just changes what you should be negotiating.

What the EA gave you

Three years of locked prices. Predictable terms. One large negotiation, then quiet.

What CSP gives you

Flexibility. You adjust license counts at each renewal instead of carrying dead weight for three years, and there is no large upfront commitment. The trade-off: prices are only locked for the length of each term, a year at most, and the reseller's margin is invisible to you.

Three things to settle before you move

1. Price protection. It does not carry across by itself. Ask how your terms are structured. Annual terms hold the price for the year; monthly terms float with Microsoft's list. Either way, the next renewal is where a list-price increase reaches you. For server software such as Windows Server and SQL Server, an annual term paid monthly now costs 5% more than paying upfront (from 1 October 2026).
2. The reseller's margin. In CSP your reseller decides what you pay on top of their cost, and most will not volunteer the number. Ask for it anyway.
3. What you are actually moving. The move is the best moment in years to drop what nobody uses. Blocked accounts from a team that left last year, still licensed and still billed, are exactly the kind of thing that gets copied straight into the new agreement. Don't migrate the slack.

The mistake we see most often

Companies treat the move as paperwork. They copy the old setup into the new agreement, unchanged. But that setup was built for an organisation that has since grown, shrunk or reorganised. Review what you have first. Then sign.

Related: Your Microsoft renewal starts six months before the quote arrives · What cost plus 1% actually means