Office 365 E5 Free Trial: How to Sign Up in 2026 (and What Changed)

If you want to test Microsoft’s top Office 365 plan before you pay for it, the Office 365 E5 free trial gives you one month and 25 licenses to try everything with real users. It’s how I set up most of my SharePoint demo tenants.

A few things have changed since I first wrote this guide: E5 now comes with or without Teams, and the trial turns into a paid subscription on its own if you don’t stop it.

Quick answer: Open Microsoft’s Office 365 E5 page, pick With Teams or Without Teams, select Try for free and sign up with a work email. You get 25 licenses for one month. If you already have a Microsoft 365 tenant, add the trial from Microsoft 365 admin center > Marketplace instead. Turn off recurring billing before the month ends if you don’t want to be charged.

In this tutorial, we’ll cover what the trial includes, both ways to start it and what happens when it ends.

What you get with the Office 365 E5 trial

Office 365 E5 is Microsoft’s most complete Office 365 plan. It adds advanced security, compliance, Power BI Pro and phone system features to the Office apps, Exchange, SharePoint and OneDrive. Here’s the trial today:

Item	What Microsoft says
Trial length	One month
Licenses	25 user licenses for the length of the trial
Storage	Trial-only tenants are limited to 300 GB of pooled storage across SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange
Payment method	A credit card is required; the trial converts to a paid subscription automatically
Teams	Your choice: Office 365 E5 (with Teams) or Office 365 E5 (no Teams)
Price after the trial (US)	$41.00 per user per month with Teams, $32.45 without Teams, paid yearly

From April 2024, new customers outside Europe could only buy E5 without Teams. Since November 1, 2025, Microsoft sells the suites with Teams to everyone again, so pick With Teams if you plan to test meetings or chat.

If you mainly want to compare collaboration tools, my guide to OneDrive vs SharePoint vs Teams explains which app does what.

Office 365 E5 or Microsoft 365 E5?

These names get mixed up a lot. Microsoft 365 E5 is Office 365 E5 plus Windows Enterprise and Enterprise Mobility + Security, which brings Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Entra ID P2 and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.

Here’s the catch: on Microsoft’s US plans page, Microsoft 365 E5 ($60.00 per user per month) only shows Contact Sales, with no self-service trial button. To test Intune or Defender, ask your Microsoft partner or sales contact.

For SharePoint sites, Power Automate, Copilot in Teams, Word and Excel add-on testing or eDiscovery, Office 365 E5 is enough.

Before you start

Have these ready:

• A work or business email address.
• A mobile number that can receive a text or a call for the verification code.
• A credit card. Microsoft requires one for the trial.
• A short name for your tenant. It becomes your yourname.onmicrosoft.com domain.
• Your country or region, which decides the data center that hosts your tenant.

Option 1: Start a new Office 365 E5 trial tenant

Use this when you don’t have a Microsoft 365 organization yet.

1. Go to the Office 365 E5 page on microsoft.com, choose With Teams or Without Teams, and select Try for free.
2. Enter your work email address and select Set up account.
3. Fill in your name, business phone, company name, company size and country or region.
4. Choose a text or a call, enter the verification code and continue.
5. Enter the domain name you want for the tenant, then select Next.
6. Create the first user. This account is the tenant’s Global Administrator, so use a strong password and save it.
7. Add your payment method when asked, review the order and finish sign-up.
8. Select Go to Setup. You can connect your own domain now or exit and do it later.

Here are the first two screens from my own sign-up:

When setup finishes, you land in the Microsoft 365 admin center, ready to add users and assign licenses. New tenants have security defaults turned on, so expect an Authenticator prompt at sign-in; my guide on Microsoft Authenticator prompts in Microsoft 365 explains why.

Option 2: Add an E5 trial to an existing tenant

If you already have Microsoft 365, add the trial to that tenant so your users and data stay in one place.

1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center as at least a Billing Administrator.
2. Select Marketplace in the left navigation (in the Simplified view, Billing > Add more products) and expand Purchase from Microsoft.
3. Search for Office 365 E5. Check that the product card shows the Trial available tag.
4. Open the product’s details, choose the trial plan instead of a paid one, enter how many licenses to buy when the trial ends, and select Start free trial. Confirm with the text or call code.
5. Go to Users > Active users, select a user, choose Licenses and apps and assign the new E5 license.

If the Trial available tag is missing, your tenant may have used that trial already, or the offer isn’t available in your region. Once licenses are assigned, you can try things like creating a SharePoint site with PowerShell right away.

What happens when the trial ends

This is the part people miss. At the end of the month, Microsoft starts billing automatically, by default as an annual term.

To stop that, go to Billing > Your products, open the trial and turn off Recurring billing before the month ends. The trial then expires, and your card isn’t charged.

If you miss the date, Microsoft’s terms give you a seven-day window after the paid subscription starts to cancel for a prorated refund.

Back up anything you want to keep first. When a trial ends without being bought, Microsoft permanently deletes the trial data, including any sites you built while comparing team sites vs communication sites. To keep the tenant, select Start a paid subscription now on the trial before it expires.

Free alternative: the Microsoft 365 Developer Program

Anyone used to get a free E5 sandbox from the Microsoft 365 Developer Program. Today, it’s only for Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscribers, eligible Microsoft partners and Premier or Unified Support customers.

If you qualify, you get 25 E5 licenses with sample data for development and testing only.

Once your trial tenant is ready, these guides help you put it to work:

• “Sharing Is Limited on This Item” in SharePoint and OneDrive: Causes and Fixes
• Difference Between OneDrive and SharePoint [Key Features]
• GitHub Copilot vs Microsoft Copilot vs ChatGPT: Which One Do You Need?

Frequently Asked Questions