There is a real Microsoft 365 student discount, but it is not a coupon — it is a whole separate product. Students and educators with an eligible school email address get Office 365 Education A1 for free, straight from Microsoft’s education site (checked August 2026). The catch that most articles bury: A1 gives you browser-only versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. No installed desktop apps. And whether you qualify at all depends entirely on your school, not on you.
If A1 is not enough, the honest fallback is a paid personal subscription. We verified Microsoft 365 Personal rows across 41 countries on 29 August 2026: $9.99/month in the US, but Egypt pays 239 EGP = $4.74 and India pays ₹689 = $7.20. More on that below, including the new Premium tier.
What the free tier actually includes
| Tier | Who pays | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Office 365 Education A1 | Free via eligible school email | Web-only Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook, Teams, OneDrive |
| Office 365 Education A3 | School pays | Adds installed desktop apps, advanced security |
| Office 365 Education A5 | School pays | Adds advanced threat protection, analytics |
| Microsoft 365 Personal | You pay | Desktop + mobile apps, 1 TB OneDrive, Copilot credits |
That table is the part competitors skip. Microsoft’s own education pages advertise “free Office 365 Education” prominently, but the fine print is that only A1 comes with the free self-signup. A3 and A5 are licenses your institution buys in bulk; you cannot claim them yourself. So “my university has Microsoft” can mean anything from bare-bones A1 to the full desktop suite — ask your IT department which one you actually hold before assuming you can install Word.
One more thing changed recently: the old A1 Plus variant, which let students install desktop apps under the free tier, was retired by Microsoft on August 1, 2024. Older blog posts still promise free desktop installs through it. They are out of date. Free now means browser.
Eligibility: the honest catch
The gate is your school, not your student ID:
- Your institution must be listed with Microsoft’s education program. Sign-up happens at Microsoft’s education portal with your official school email address.
- Microsoft verifies the email domain against its database of accredited institutions. Approval is usually instant but can take up to around ten days when manual review kicks in.
- If your school is a Google Workspace school or simply never signed up with Microsoft, there is no individual workaround. You cannot buy your way into A1, and no VPN or document trick creates eligibility.
This makes the Microsoft deal different from verification-vendor student discounts like Spotify or Hulu. Those check you. This one checks your institution first and you second. Community colleges, big state universities, and most European public universities are typically covered. Small private schools and bootcamps frequently are not.
Also worth saying plainly: this is a legitimate global program, so unlike paid subscriptions there is no country arbitrage angle here. Free is free in every currency. Where country pricing matters is the paid fallback below.
When you need more than A1
Browser-only apps fall apart fast if any of these describe you:
- You write long documents offline — trains, flights, dorm Wi-Fi outages.
- Your course needs desktop Excel features: Power Query, macros, solver add-ins.
- You share files with family and want the storage pool of a personal plan.
Your options, cheapest first:
The Basic tier. Microsoft sells a Basic plan at $1.99/month in the US (verified 29 August 2026) with mobile and web apps plus modest storage. It does not include desktop apps either, so it mostly adds storage and removes ads from email.
Personal, priced by country. The standard answer. US list is $9.99/month, but the same plan is dramatically cheaper elsewhere. Verified rows from 29 August 2026:
| Country | Local price | USD/month | vs US |
|---|---|---|---|
| Egypt | 239 EGP | $4.74 | −53% |
| Nigeria | ₦7,200 | $5.32 | −47% |
| Turkey | ₺329.99 | $6.88 | −31% |
| India | ₹689 | $7.20 | −28% |
| Philippines | ₱489 | $7.91 | −21% |
| United States | $9.99 | $9.99 | — |
We keep the full ranking of every tracked country in the Microsoft 365 price-by-country guide and the complete plan-level tables on the Microsoft 365 service page. Honest caveat, same one we give everywhere: paying another country’s price means billing in that market, which usually requires a local payment method. Students studying abroad sometimes already have one — everyone else should treat those rows as reference, not instructions.
Premium, if you want Copilot. In late 2025 Microsoft folded Copilot Pro into a new consumer top tier, Microsoft 365 Premium, at $19.99/month in the US (verified row, 29 August 2026). It bundles the desktop apps, up to 6 TB of pooled OneDrive storage across shared accounts, and the full Copilot features. Standalone Copilot Pro stopped renewing after August 1, 2026, so Premium is now the only way to buy that bundle new. It is expensive next to Personal, and nothing about the education program covers it.
What happens after graduation
Nothing dramatic at first, which is exactly the trap. Your A1 access does not expire on a date Microsoft controls — it expires when your school deactivates your account. Some institutions keep alumni accounts alive for a few months; many cut them off quickly, especially when the graduating class rolls over in summer.
Three practical steps before your last semester ends:
- Download everything from OneDrive that you care about. Once the account dies, recovery is a ticket to your school’s IT helpdesk, and they will eventually delete the tenant data too.
- Note which logins use your school email as the recovery address and switch them to a personal one. Losing a recovery address locks you out of unrelated accounts.
- Decide whether you actually need desktop Office going forward. Many graduates discover the free web apps cover them until a specific job requirement says otherwise.
If you do need a personal plan afterward, the country table above is the price map. And if your student status is about to end but your developer ambitions are not, the free JetBrains, GitHub Copilot, and Figma grants in our student dev tools roundup follow the same enrollment clock — claim them while you still verify.
How this compares to other student deals
Ranked by real value to a typical student:
- Microsoft 365 Education A1: genuinely free, unlimited duration while enrolled, but web-only.
- GitHub/JetBrains/Figma grants: also free, higher monetary value (~$100+/year each), developer-only.
- Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Premium student tiers: roughly half-price streaming, annual re-verification.
- Netflix: no student discount at all.
The Microsoft offer wins on breadth — nearly every student touches a document editor weekly — even though it is the most restricted of the free ones. Verify your school first, export your files before graduation, and only pay Personal prices after checking whether the web version of Word annoys you enough to matter.