What Teams Premium is
Teams Premium is Microsoft's add-on licence for organisations that want more from meetings than the base Teams client offers. Microsoft's Australian page lists it at AU$15.00 per user per month on an annual subscription, with GST added at checkout (checked September 2026). It does not replace a Teams licence — Microsoft Learn is explicit that users need both a Teams licence and a Teams Premium licence for the features to work — and the tenant needs at least one active Premium licence before an admin can even manage the Premium settings. Microsoft groups the add-on into four buckets: more personalised and intelligent meetings, enhanced meeting protection, advanced management and reporting for IT, and advanced Bookings and virtual appointments.
What's actually in it
Protection and management: watermarking and end-to-end encryption enforced through sensitivity labels, restrictions on who can record or copy chat and transcripts, detection of sensitive content during screen sharing, one-time-passcode verification for anonymous joiners, real-time telemetry and audio, video and screen-share quality alerts. Personalisation: organisation-wide meeting backgrounds, meeting themes and meeting templates. Intelligence: intelligent meeting recap, live translated captions and transcripts, and AI-decorated backgrounds. Calls: intelligent call recap and the Queues app for call-queue supervision, which additionally needs a Teams Phone licence. Bookings: SMS reminders, appointment queues and usage analytics. Microsoft's Australian marketing page also lists advanced webinars and town halls (checked September 2026).
The April 2026 change and the Copilot overlap
Two things shifted the value of this licence in 2026. First, from 1 April 2026 Microsoft moved some previously Premium-only features into Teams Enterprise, saying Premium continues to offer advanced meeting protection, advanced communication such as the Queues app, branding and personalisation, and intelligence capabilities; customers who bought Premium before that date keep everything until their licences expire. Second, the AI features overlap with Microsoft 365 Copilot: Microsoft Learn states intelligent recap requires either a Teams Premium licence or a Microsoft Copilot licence, and audio recap needs Copilot specifically. If a Copilot rollout is on your roadmap, do not buy Premium for the recap.
Who needs it — and who doesn't
Buy it for the organiser, not the audience: most Premium features apply when the meeting organiser holds the licence, so a few hundred licences for executives, legal, HR and the people who run client-facing sessions usually covers a tenant. Regulated or sensitive meetings — board papers, M&A, health and legal — justify the watermark, encryption and label-driven controls on their own. A small service desk or reception team running Teams Phone gets the Queues app, a lightweight contact-centre feature, for far less than a dedicated platform. Organisations that mainly want AI notes should compare against Copilot first, and general knowledge workers who just attend meetings rarely need it at all.
Try it before buying
Microsoft Learn describes two zero-cost routes. An admin can add a 30-day Teams Premium trial from the Microsoft 365 admin centre, which comes with 25 licences to assign, and individual users can start a 60-day self-service trial directly from the Teams client on the organisation's existing tenant with no payment details. Admins keep control of the features either way. Frontrow's advice: run the admin trial on the exact organiser group you would license, switch on the meeting templates and sensitivity-label controls during the trial rather than only the recap, and measure whether anyone notices when it lapses — that is the honest test of whether AU$15.00 a month is earning anything.