Office Licensing · Buyer Comparison
Microsoft Office Home & Business 2024
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. One payment, one PC or Mac, yours permanently — with commercial use rights and instant UK delivery. —
The line Microsoft buries on its own product page
Microsoft 365 Family is marketed on a single number: six people. Six accounts, six terabytes of storage, one bill. Against that, a perpetual Office licence covering one device looks almost quaint.
But look at how Microsoft actually words the entitlement on its UK store page. Not in the small print — in the feature list itself:
“For 1 to 6 people (AI for subscription owner only)”
And again in the footnotes: “AI features only available to subscription owner and cannot be shared; usage limits apply.”
This is the part that reframes the whole comparison. Copilot — the reason most people are talked into Microsoft 365 in 2026 — is attached to one account on the plan. The person who set it up. Everyone else gets Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, a terabyte of OneDrive and Defender, and no AI whatsoever inside the apps.
If you bought Family so your partner could use Copilot in Excel, or so a teenager could use it for coursework, that isn’t what you bought. Microsoft has an explicit FAQ on its own comparison page titled “Can I share my AI benefits with others?”. The answer is no.
What each option costs, as of August 2026
Microsoft raised consumer subscription pricing again. The current UK list prices, taken directly from Microsoft’s store today:
| Plan | Annual | Monthly | People |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Personal | £84.99 | £8.49 | 1 |
| Microsoft 365 Family | £104.99 | £10.49 | 1–6 |
| Microsoft 365 Premium | £189.99 | £18.99 | 1–6 |
| Office Home 2024 (Microsoft RRP) | £119.99 once | — | 1 device |
| Office Home & Business 2024 | — once | — | 1 device |
Two things worth flagging. First, Family at £104.99 is a meaningful step up from the £84.99 it sat at previously — the fourth consumer price movement in five years. Second, there is now a Microsoft 365 Premium tier at £189.99 a year, which is where the genuinely capable Copilot features have moved. If you subscribe to Family expecting current-generation AI agents, Microsoft’s answer is another £85 a year on top.
When you commit to a subscription you are not agreeing to today’s price. You are agreeing to whatever Microsoft charges in year three, with your files, your email and your household’s habits already inside the platform. A perpetual licence has no year three.
The honest break-even: it’s a device count question
Most anti-subscription articles quietly compare one subscription seat against one perpetual licence and declare victory. That’s not the question a family is actually asking. The question is: how many people in this house genuinely need Office, on how many machines?
Here is the five-year cumulative cost, honestly plotted. Home & Business licences scale linearly with devices; Family is flat regardless of how many of the six seats you fill.
Five-year cumulative cost — Office Home & Business 2024 (one-time, per device) vs Microsoft 365 Family (£104.99/year, up to six people). UK pricing, August 2026.
Assumes no further Microsoft price increases over the five years — an assumption that has not held historically.
The crossover sits between three and four users. Below that, buying outright is decisively cheaper. Above it, Family wins on headline cost and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
But five years is an arbitrary window, and it’s the window Microsoft’s own marketing prefers. Extend it and the picture moves, because perpetual licences stop costing money and subscriptions don’t:
| Household | H&B 2024 — 5 yrs | Family — 5 yrs | H&B 2024 — 10 yrs | Family — 10 yrs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 person | — | £525 | — | £1,050 |
| 2 people | — | £525 | — | £1,050 |
| 3 people | — | £525 | — | £1,050 |
| 4 people | — | £525 | — | £1,050 |
| 6 people | — | £525 | — | £1,050 |
At six genuine users, a decade of Microsoft 365 Family costs roughly the same as buying six perpetual licences outright — except that at the end of it you own nothing, and the perpetual buyer has owned their software for ten years.
Count the people who will genuinely open Word or Excel on a computer this month. Not the number of people in the house, and not the number of phones. Microsoft’s mobile apps are free to use for viewing and light editing on small screens without any subscription at all — so a teenager who only ever opens documents on a phone is not a reason to pay for a seat.
Feature by feature, without the marketing
| Office H&B 2024 | Microsoft 365 Family | |
|---|---|---|
| Payment | One-time | £104.99/year, forever |
| Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote | ✓ | ✓ |
| Access (Windows only) | ✗ | ✓ |
| People covered | 1 | Up to 6 |
| Devices | 1 PC or Mac | 5 signed in per person |
| Copilot in the desktop apps | ✗ | Owner only |
| OneDrive storage | None bundled | 1 TB per person |
| Microsoft Defender | ✗ | ✓ |
| Microsoft Teams | Free download | Included |
| Mobile & tablet apps | ✗ | ✓ |
| Real-time co-authoring | ✗ | ✓ |
| New features after purchase | No — fixed at release | Continuous |
| Access if you stop paying | Permanent | Lost |
| Works fully offline | Always | Periodic sign-in required |
| Commercial use rights | Explicitly granted | Ambiguous — see below |
| Security updates until | 9 October 2029 | While subscribed |
Two concessions worth making plainly, because you’ll find them out anyway. Access is included in Microsoft 365 consumer plans and is not in Home & Business 2024. If someone in the house runs a desktop database, that’s a real gap — though Office Professional Plus 2024 includes Access, and costs less than Home & Business. And Defender, mobile apps and 6 TB of storage are genuine value if you would otherwise pay for them separately. Most households wouldn’t.
The business question — and why we won’t give you a flat answer
This comes up constantly: can a sole trader or freelancer just use the household’s Microsoft 365 Family subscription for work?
Microsoft’s own documentation is not consistent on this. The supplemental licence terms for Microsoft 365 Family and Personal grant the software “for your personal use” in section 1(a) — but section 2(f) of the same document states that “the noncommercial use restriction in the Microsoft Services Agreement does not apply to Microsoft 365 subscription Services.” Those two clauses pull in opposite directions, and Microsoft’s own community answers contradict each other on it. Anyone telling you the position is clear-cut has not read the terms.
What is not ambiguous is what a consumer plan does not give a business, regardless of how you read the licence:
- No Microsoft 365 admin centre — no central control over accounts, devices or data
- No email on your own domain; you’re on outlook.com addresses
- No business-grade support commitment or service level agreement
- No data governance, retention policy or eDiscovery
- Server installation and commercial hosting are expressly prohibited in the terms
- If the account holder leaves or stops paying, everyone loses access at once
Office Home & Business 2024 sidesteps the argument entirely. Commercial use rights are explicit in the product — it is in the name — and the licence sits on your books as a one-time purchase rather than a recurring operating cost. For a sole trader or freelancer, that’s the cleaner position and the cheaper one.
If you need domain email, shared calendars and central administration, the honest answer is a Microsoft 365 Business plan, not a consumer plan stretched to fit. If you need the desktop apps and nothing else, buy them once. What you shouldn’t do is run a business on a Family subscription and assume the licence covers you.
The caveat we’re obliged to give you
Office 2024 receives security updates until 9 October 2029. That date is fixed — it does not restart when you buy. Purchase today and you have roughly three years of patches, not five.
The software keeps working indefinitely after that. But if you want a supported Office suite in 2030, you will be buying something again. Factor that in: the ten-year columns above assume you’re comfortable running an unpatched suite in later years, or that you’ll buy the next perpetual release when it arrives. Even allowing for a second purchase, the arithmetic holds for one or two users.
Subscriptions don’t have this problem. That’s a legitimate point in their favour, and it’s the strongest one Microsoft has that isn’t about AI.
The verdict
- One or two people in the household genuinely use Office on a computer
- You want commercial use rights without reading licence clauses
- You’d rather own software than rent it, and you don’t want a renewal date
- You work offline, or you’d rather your documents stayed on your machine
- You don’t use Copilot — or you’ve realised only one of you would get it anyway
- Four or more people will genuinely use the desktop apps
- You want the terabyte-per-person storage and would otherwise pay for cloud backup
- Phones and tablets matter as much as computers in your house
- Real-time co-authoring is part of how your household actually works
- You want Defender across the family’s devices in the same bill
The dishonest version of this article says subscriptions are always a rip-off. They aren’t. A genuine six-person household that uses everything in the plan is getting reasonable value at £104.99. The problem is that most households buying Family aren’t that household — they’re one or two real users paying six-seat prices, for AI that only one of them can access.
Office Home & Business 2024 — —
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote for one PC or Mac. Perpetual licence, commercial use rights, delivered by email within minutes. Lifetime warranty and UK-based support seven days a week.
Need Access as well? Office Professional Plus 2024 includes it — and costs less at —.
Frequently asked questions
No. Microsoft states on its own product page that AI features are “available to subscription owner and cannot be shared.” The five additional people you invite receive the desktop and mobile apps, 1 TB of OneDrive each, Defender and Teams — but no Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. If AI access for more than one person is what you’re buying, Microsoft 365 Family does not deliver it.
£104.99 per year, or £10.49 per month, covering up to six people with 1 TB of cloud storage each. Microsoft 365 Personal is £84.99 per year for one person. A newer Microsoft 365 Premium tier sits above both at £189.99 per year and holds the more advanced Copilot capabilities. All prices are Microsoft’s UK list prices as of August 2026 and are subject to change.
It depends entirely on how many people genuinely need the desktop apps. For one or two users, buying Office Home & Business 2024 outright is substantially cheaper — the crossover happens inside the second year. At three users the two options are roughly level over five years and perpetual pulls ahead over ten. At four or more genuine users, Microsoft 365 Family is cheaper over five years. Count actual computer users, not household members.
Microsoft’s licence terms are not consistent on this point — one section grants the software for personal use, another states the noncommercial restriction does not apply to Microsoft 365 subscriptions. What is clear is that consumer plans provide no admin centre, no email on your own domain, no business support commitment and no data governance, and that server installation and commercial hosting are expressly prohibited. Office Home & Business 2024 includes commercial use rights explicitly, which removes the question. For a business needing domain email and central administration, a Microsoft 365 Business plan is the correct product.
Your files remain yours — Microsoft does not delete your documents. But the desktop applications drop into a read-only reduced functionality mode, so you can open and print files but not edit or create them. OneDrive storage also reverts to the free 5 GB allowance, and anything above that becomes read-only until you reduce your usage or resubscribe. With a perpetual licence there is no equivalent cliff edge.
Neither. Home & Business 2024 covers Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote for one PC or Mac, with no bundled cloud storage. Microsoft Access is available in Office Professional Plus 2024, which is Windows only. You can still save to OneDrive using the free 5 GB tier, or buy standalone storage separately — a 100 GB OneDrive plan costs around £2 a month, which still leaves you well ahead of a full subscription.
Until 9 October 2029, under Microsoft’s Fixed Lifecycle Policy. That date is fixed from the October 2024 release and does not reset when you buy, so a licence purchased in August 2026 carries roughly three years of security patches. The software continues to function after that date but stops receiving fixes. Always verify lifecycle dates against Microsoft’s own lifecycle documentation before making a purchase decision.
No. Each licence activates one PC or one Mac. For a second machine you need a second licence. The licence attaches to your Microsoft account through setup.microsoft.com, so if you reinstall Windows or move to a new computer you can reactivate on the replacement machine at no extra cost — but not run both simultaneously.
Microsoft 365 pricing and features quoted are Microsoft’s UK list prices as at August 2026 and are subject to change — check Microsoft’s current pricing page before deciding. Related reading: Office Home & Business 2024: complete buyer’s guide · Home & Business vs Professional Plus · Microsoft Copilot: free vs paid · Cancelling Microsoft 365 · Microsoft Office one-time purchase: your 2026 options
Gary Walsh is the Head of Tech Support at Software Supplies, with more than 20 years in the IT industry. Fully Microsoft-certified and experienced across the full business software stack — from Windows and Office to cloud infrastructure and device management — Gary delivers practical, no-nonsense advice that helps users and businesses get the most from their technology.
