The carbon footprint of Microsoft 365 Premium
Microsoft publishes some per-prompt figures: per-query energy for frontier-scale models in a peer-reviewed paper, including a reasoning scenario — not a figure for Copilot itself. Below is what a Microsoft 365 Premium subscription plausibly emits in a month, with every assumption shown, and a pass that funds well beyond it.
Disclosed by the maker
Microsoft 365 Premium$19.99/mo plan · Advanced Copilot chat with extensive usage
Estimated emissions a month
4.6 g – 1.6 kg CO₂e
At the high end, about 0.17 quarter-pound beef burgers a month.
Everyday pass · $3 a month
Funds about 110 kg of verified carbon credits a month — roughly 70× the high end of this estimate.
The assumptions
- 365 Premium
- 10 to 100 queries a day, with up to 25% long reasoning answers at the high end.
- Per query
- Microsoft's published figure for a typical query of about 300 output tokens to a frontier-scale model: median 0.31 Wh, with the middle half of queries between 0.16 and 0.60 Wh. Not a figure for Copilot specifically; CO₂e is our calculation.
- Left out
- Image and video generation, and the large contexts coding agents read on every step — no published study measures those yet.
Plan details from Microsoft — Compare Microsoft 365 plans, checked 2026-09-15. Carbon Shredder is not affiliated with Microsoft. How we estimate every plan.
Common questions
- How much CO₂ does Microsoft 365 Premium produce?
- By our estimate, 4.6 g – 1.6 kg CO₂e a month — from light use to hard daily use with long reasoning answers. Nobody outside Microsoft knows actual usage, so this is a range, not a measurement.
- Does Microsoft publish the environmental impact of Microsoft 365 Premium?
- Microsoft publishes some per-prompt figures: per-query energy for frontier-scale models in a peer-reviewed paper, including a reasoning scenario — not a figure for Copilot itself.
- What does the climate pass for Microsoft 365 Premium fund?
- The Everyday pass costs $3 a month and funds about 110 kg of verified carbon credits at today's price — roughly 70× the high end of our estimate. The credits are retired in your name with registry serial numbers.
- Does the pass make Microsoft 365 Premium carbon neutral?
- No. It funds verified carbon credits, which you can check on a public registry. The emissions from your AI use still happened — the honest claim is how many kilograms of credits you funded.