Microsoft Teams in 2026: Free vs Paid Plans, Setup and What's New

Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s chat, meetings and calling app, and you can use it for free with a personal Microsoft account or through a work or school account that includes it. The free tier covers unlimited chat and group calls of up to 60 minutes with up to 100 people, while paid plans add longer meetings, more storage and business admin tools.

Teams has been climbing the App Store charts this week, so below is a practical rundown of which version you actually need, how to set it up properly, and what is changing as of October 2026.

Which version of Teams are you looking at?

The name “Microsoft Teams” covers a few different things, and that’s the source of most confusion.

• Teams (free) is the personal version for friends, family, clubs and very small groups. It runs on a personal Microsoft account.
• Teams Essentials is Microsoft’s standalone business plan for small teams that want Teams without the full Office bundle.
• Teams inside Microsoft 365 is what most companies and schools use. It comes with plans such as Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard and Premium, plus enterprise and education plans, and it’s managed by your IT admin.

It’s the same app in every case. What changes is the account you sign in with and the limits attached to it.

What Teams free includes

According to Microsoft’s Teams free page and its support article on free calls, the free version gives you:

• Unlimited chat with friends and family
• Group calls and meetings of up to 60 minutes, with up to 100 participants
• One-to-one calls of up to 30 hours
• 5 GB of cloud storage
• Tasks and polls, plus data encryption for meetings, chats, calls and files

The 60-minute cap on group calls is the limit people run into most often. If you pay for a consumer Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan, Microsoft says group meetings go up to 30 hours and 300 participants, and you also get 1 TB of cloud storage per user.

Older articles from 2020 describe 300-person, 24-hour free calls. That was a temporary pandemic-era allowance. Microsoft’s current pages list the 100-person, 60-minute limits.

Free vs paid: a quick comparison

Prices below are US list prices for business plans, and they change. Treat them as a starting point and confirm them on Microsoft’s site.

The Business Basic increase comes from Office Watch’s breakdown of the July 2026 price changes, which also reports Business Standard rising from $12.50 to $14 and Business Premium staying at $22. Office Watch says the versions of these plans sold without Teams went up by an even larger share. For example, Business Basic without Teams went from $4.40 to $5.40.

The $4 Teams Essentials figure appears in several independent guides, including Redress Compliance’s 2026 licensing guide, which describes it as aimed at organizations with fewer than 300 users. None of the sources we checked said whether Essentials changed in the July 2026 update, so check Microsoft’s pricing page before you budget for it.

How to choose

1. Only calling family or a small group, and most calls are short? Stay on the free version.
2. Regularly hitting the 60-minute limit at home? A Microsoft 365 Personal or Family plan removes it and adds storage.
3. A small business that already uses Google Workspace or other tools for documents? Teams Essentials is the lightest paid option.
4. A business that also needs email, Office apps and shared storage? A Microsoft 365 Business plan is usually the better value than paying for Teams on its own.

How to install Teams on iPhone (and sign in correctly)

The App Store is the official way to get Teams on iPhone and iPad. Use the listing published by Microsoft Corporation.

1. Open the App Store, tap Search and type “Microsoft Teams”.
2. Tap Get (or the cloud icon if you’ve installed it before on that Apple account).
3. Open Teams. When it asks for notifications and microphone access, allowing both is recommended, or you won’t hear calls or get message alerts.
4. Sign in with a work, school or personal Microsoft account. If you already use another Microsoft app such as Outlook on the phone, Teams may offer that account on the next screen.
5. If your organization uses multi-factor authentication, approve the prompt from your authenticator app.

A few practical tips:

• Use the right account for the right job. Your work or school account shows your organization’s teams and channels. A personal account shows Teams free. You can add both to the same app and switch between them.
• Login rules come from your IT department. University and company help pages differ on email formats and verification methods, so your organization’s IT page is the authority for work and school accounts.
• Never enter your Microsoft password on a site that isn’t Microsoft’s. Teams sign-in always goes through Microsoft’s own login screen.

On Windows and Mac, download Teams from Microsoft’s website. Don’t use third-party download mirrors.

What’s changing in Teams this fall (as of October 2026)

Microsoft ships Teams updates monthly, and rollouts are staggered, so you may see some of these features before or after a colleague does.

Google Calendar sync is being retired

If your organization synced Teams calendars with Google Workspace, this one matters. Microsoft’s Message Center notice MC1462469, published August 26, 2026, says calendar sync between Teams and Google Workspace will no longer be supported starting in October 2026. Calendars set up to sync will stop syncing, and admins will lose the sync setup in the Admin app in Teams.

Microsoft asks admins to notify affected users and save any account-matching information they need before the cutoff. People can still schedule and join Teams meetings from Google Calendar through Microsoft’s Teams Meeting add-on for Google Workspace. Some calendar vendors point out that the add-on isn’t a full two-way sync of free/busy status and event changes, so test your scheduling workflow before assuming nothing changed.

Meeting and calling changes

Ohio State’s IT roundup of Microsoft 365 updates lists several Teams changes scheduled to finish rolling out around October 2026:

• A redesigned sharing panel in meetings, with a two-step confirmation to cut down on accidental screen sharing. Admins can also pin up to two apps to the main meeting controls.
• Suspicious call reporting. Users can flag suspicious group calls from their call history, and admins can review those reports in the Teams admin center and Microsoft Defender. It’s on by default.
• Live captions updates, including a side panel, a consolidated settings menu and an option to turn captions on automatically.
• Planner tabs in shared and private channels, with only basic plans supported at first.

Exact rollout dates can slip. If a feature matters to your team, your admin can confirm its status in the Microsoft 365 Message Center.

Is Teams worth sticking with long term?

For organizations already paying for Microsoft 365, Teams is effectively included, and its tight link to Outlook, OneDrive and SharePoint is the main reason teams stay with it. For personal use, the free tier is generous for chat and quick calls, but the 60-minute group limit makes it a poor fit for long weekly calls unless you upgrade.

If you’re comparing it with other chat or meeting tools, focus on three things: the meeting length limit on the plan you’d actually buy, whether your documents already live in Microsoft 365, and how much your admin needs to control. Those factors matter more than any single new feature.