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Licensing · Updated 28 October 2026 · first published 6 September 2026 · 9 min read
Most companies stay with a reseller they are unhappy with because they believe leaving means a migration. It does not. Your tenant, users, mailboxes and files stay exactly where they are; what changes is who invoices you for the subscriptions. Microsoft gives partners a transfer process for this in Partner Center, and when the current partner will not use it there is a second route that costs nothing extra if it is timed to your renewal dates.
The change, in one table
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What moves | The billing of your CSP subscriptions: licence-based ones such as Microsoft 365, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, and, through a separate request, the Azure plan with its reservations and savings plans. |
| What stays put | The tenant, every user and password, every mailbox, SharePoint site, Teams channel and OneDrive. Nothing is reinstalled and nothing is migrated. |
| What carries over | User counts, renewal settings and the end date of each term. Each transferred subscription gets a new subscription ID, at the price of the original. |
| What does not move | The old partner’s support contract and its own add-on services, and its delegated admin access, which you remove. Volume Licensing (Enterprise Agreement, Open Value, MPSA) is a different programme and is not part of a CSP transfer. |
| Time | A transfer request is valid for 30 days. Once the current partner submits it, Microsoft processes it within 72 hours. |
| Limits | Up to 25 licence-based line items per billing plan in one request, so a large estate goes in several. Transfers happen between partners in the same Microsoft CSP region. |
Microsoft designed the Cloud Solution Provider programme so that the customer owns the tenant and the partner holds a billing relationship to it. That one design decision is why changing partner is not a project: the thing you would be afraid to move — the tenant with everything in it — never moves.
Rarely the licence itself. People change because the invoice arrives from a company that has done nothing else since the last invoice: a licensing question goes unanswered for a week, a renewal comes as a surprise, a security setting nobody configured lets a phishing email through, an engineer has never been seen. Or because the company now has entities in three countries and the partner can invoice in one. The licence is the smallest part of what a Microsoft partner is for; when it is the only part, the partner is a payment processor.
Azure has its own request. Azure subscriptions under an Azure plan, reservations and savings plans can transfer, but reservations have to be selected explicitly, and if the billing currency changes with the move, a savings plan is cancelled at the start of the next billing cycle and has to be bought again. Read the Azure side line by line before promising a date.
Send the licence list from your admin centre — a screenshot is enough. We reply with the route for each line, the dates, and the seats nobody is using. No transfer starts until you say so.
Many Microsoft resellers are not direct. An indirect reseller sells through a distributor — in Microsoft’s terms an indirect provider — and it is the provider that holds the subscriptions in Partner Center. The reseller you talk to is a layer on top. That changes who has to act, not whether the move can happen.
Where we sit in this: our European entity is a direct reseller, so in Europe and the United Kingdom we create the request ourselves. In Canada, Australia and the Middle East our entities sell through distributors, and there the distributor handles the request on our behalf.
If the current partner does not act, or a line cannot transfer, the same result comes the slower way, and it is always available because licences can be bought from any partner authorised for your region:
A staggered estate can take up to a year to move fully this way. That is normal, and the new partner should plan around your dates rather than ask you to pay twice.
A transfer can happen at any point in a term: the end date stays the same, so an annual subscription with four months left has four months left with the new partner. The renewal date is the moment to change what you buy — drop seats, add, move to a longer term — and the transfer is the moment to change who you buy it from. They can coincide; they do not need to. A group with entities in several countries usually moves country by country, each to the entity that invoices in the right currency, and keeps one tenant throughout.
We are a CSP partner, so we benefit when people move. But the mechanics above are the same in either direction, including away from us. Nobody should be told that switching partner is risky: done in this order, it is one of the least risky changes you can make to a Microsoft tenant.
The move is the moment to fix what the old partner never did: licences nobody uses, security settings nobody configured, renewals nobody planned. We can take the licensing and the support around it.
No. The tenant, sign-ins, mail, files and Teams do not change, and nothing is reinstalled. The visible difference is the company name on the invoice.
It can leave the request unanswered; after 30 days the request expires. Microsoft states that it cannot intervene on behalf of the customer or the current partner. The second route — buying the same subscriptions from the new partner and letting the old ones end — is always available.
No. User counts, renewal settings and end dates carry over, and the transferred subscription is created at the price of the original, with a new subscription ID.
Yes. The request goes to the distributor, which holds the subscriptions in Partner Center, and the distributor sets which reseller becomes the partner of record.
Only within seven calendar days of purchase, for a prorated refund. After that an annual term runs to its end date whoever sold it, so time the move to those dates rather than paying twice.
It needs to be authorised for the Microsoft CSP region that contains your tenant’s country. Transfers happen between partners in the same region.
Checked against Microsoft’s documentation on 28 October 2026: