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Microsoft 365 Family and Premium: OneDrive Shifts from 1 TB per Person to 2 TB Shared
Do you share a Microsoft 365 Family or Premium subscription with loved ones? Then read this carefully: the 1 TB of OneDrive storage allocated to each member is being replaced by a 2 TB quota shared across all users on the subscription. That means 2 TB instead of 6 TB. Here’s what you need to know.
Microsoft is changing the OneDrive storage rules for its shared consumer subscriptions. Until now, Microsoft 365 Family and Microsoft 365 Premium offered 1 TB for each member, for a total of up to 6 TB for six people. From now on, the main subscriber and their five guests will share a common 2 TB storage pool.
Microsoft announced this change in a new support document, where it is clearly stated that files remain private for each user. However, storage is now pooled. If additional storage is purchased by one member, it is added to this shared pool, up to 10 TB per subscription.
The price, however, is not changing. The Redmond company still lists the Microsoft 365 Family subscription at 129 euros per year, with the note "Up to 2 TB of secure shared cloud storage", and Microsoft 365 Premium at 219 euros per year. As a reminder, in January 2025, I published an article about the integration of Copilot into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, which came with a price increase: the Family plan had then risen from 99 to 129 euros per year. This time, the price stays the same, but the maximum storage is cut by three.
The Microsoft 365 Pro plan follows the same logic, with 5 TB shared instead of 1 TB per person. The other subscriptions, namely Basic (100 GB) and Personal (1 TB), designed for a single user, are unchanged.
Who is affected, and when does this take effect?
Depending on whether you are on a new subscription or an existing one, the timeline is not the same. Here’s what you need to know:
- New subscriptions: shared storage has applied since October 8, 2026.
- Existing Family and Premium subscribers: the switch takes place at the first renewal starting May 2, 2027, after an informational email from Microsoft.
- Moving from Family to Premium: the switch is immediate, even before May 2027.
- Existing Pro subscribers: the move to 5 TB shared is scheduled for November 1, 2027, according to the Microsoft storage quotas page.
To support this transition period, Microsoft plans to offer extra storage for some existing subscribers in "supported markets". However, I could not find any details: capacity, duration, list of countries... So nothing says France will be included.
What this changes in practical terms
For six people, 2 TB means about 333 GB per person on average, compared with 1 TB until now. A single user, on the other hand, moves from 1 TB to 2 TB for the same price. So it all depends on how you use your subscription. In other words, the shared pool may benefit one heavy user if the others use little.
That is precisely Microsoft’s argument. In the FAQ, here is what it says: "Total storage varies by plan, but the shared storage model gives you more flexibility in how you use the storage within the subscription".
If you go over the limit, access is not cut off immediately, and notifications are sent as you approach the cap. "If your subscription exceeds the limit, you can continue to access your files for up to one year while you manage your storage," Microsoft says.
Let’s end with a quick tip: before your subscription renews, add up the storage used by each member, visible in the storage dashboard of their Microsoft account. That will help you know where you stand.
