Power BI Q&A retirement in February 2027: what Copilot needs and costs

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Microsoft is retiring Power BI Q&A, the natural language question box that has shipped free with Power BI for years. The current Microsoft Learn pages for Q&A carry a notice that Q&A experiences are going away in February 2027 and point users to Copilot for Power BI instead. The original deprecation announcement from December 2025 set the end date for December 2026; the documentation updated in 2026 now gives February 2027, so report owners have roughly three months left from mid-November.

The cost question follows directly from the licensing. Microsoft's Q&A overview says Power BI Q&A "is free and available to all users". Copilot for Power BI requires organizational capacity: a paid Fabric capacity of F2 or higher, or Power BI Premium P1 or higher, and the Copilot requirements page states that a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User license alone is not sufficient. A team that answers questions today with a Q&A visual in a Pro workspace loses that feature in February 2027 and needs at least an F2 capacity to get natural language querying back through Copilot. On the Azure retail price list checked on November 15, 2026, F2 works out to $262.80 per month pay-as-you-go in East US.

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POWER BI Q&A RETIREMENT TIMELINE AND WHAT STOPS WORKING.

Microsoft's deprecation post lists two groups of features. The first is the Q&A experiences: Q&A visuals and buttons in reports, the Q&A question box on dashboards, Q&A in the Power BI mobile app and Q&A in embedded analytics. The second is Q&A Setup, the authoring tools report designers use to tune answers: synonyms, linguistic relationships, row labels, hide from Q&A, teach Q&A, review questions and suggest questions.

When the retirement takes effect, Microsoft says new Q&A experiences can no longer be created and existing Q&A visuals in reports, dashboards, mobile and embedded scenarios stop working. Both Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service are covered. The Learn pages for the Q&A overview and for Q&A limitations, last updated in June and September 2026, give the month as February 2027 without a specific day.

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Date	Status per Microsoft
December 2025	Deprecation announced
December 2026	Original full retirement date
February 2027	Current date on Microsoft Learn

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Power BI Report Server never supported Q&A, according to the limitations page, so on-premises report estates are unaffected. Every Q&A visual published to the Power BI service, embedded in an application or pinned to a dashboard is in scope.

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COPILOT REPLACEMENTS FOR EACH POWER BI Q&A SURFACE.

Microsoft maps each Q&A surface to a Copilot experience. The replacement for Q&A Setup is Prep data for AI, which is still in preview on Microsoft Learn and covers AI data schemas, verified answers and AI instructions saved with the semantic model.

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Q&A surface	Microsoft's replacement
Q&A visual in reports	Copilot with Power BI reports
Q&A box on dashboards	Standalone Copilot experience
Q&A in mobile	Copilot in Power BI Mobile
Q&A in embedded (SaaS)	Copilot for SaaS
Q&A in embedded (PaaS)	Copilot support announced as coming
Q&A Setup tools	Prep data for AI (preview)

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The setup tools do not map one to one. Synonyms and linguistic relationships exist in the Q&A linguistic schema, while Prep data for AI works through an AI data schema, verified answers that return a chosen visual for set trigger phrases, and free-text AI instructions. Microsoft's deprecation post promises migration documentation but does not describe an automatic conversion of existing synonyms. The steps to build the new configuration are covered in our guide on how to prep a Power BI semantic model for Copilot.

One dependency runs the other way for now. The Prep data for AI documentation lists enabling Power BI Q&A on the semantic model as a requirement. Microsoft's FAQ on the deprecation says Q&A and Copilot will be separated and that a new file format is planned to remove the dependency, with details still to come.

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COPILOT IN POWER BI CAPACITY AND LICENSE REQUIREMENTS.

The Copilot for Power BI overview, last updated August 24, 2026, lists the conditions that every organization replacing Q&A has to meet. Trial capacities and free SKUs are excluded.

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Requirement	What Microsoft documents
Capacity	Paid Fabric F2+ or Premium P1+
Pro or PPU only	Not sufficient for Copilot
Tenant setting	Copilot and Azure OpenAI features on
Region	Capacity in a supported region
Sovereign clouds	Not supported
Standalone Copilot	Extra tenant setting, preview
Capacity changes	Up to 24 hours to take effect

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Tenants or capacities outside the United States and the EU data boundary have Copilot disabled by default unless the Fabric admin allows data to be processed outside the tenant's geographic region. The standalone experience and Copilot in apps are also unavailable in a list of regions that includes India West, Korea South, Qatar Central, UAE Central, France South, Germany North and Norway West. A full walkthrough of these settings is in our reference on Copilot in Power BI requirements.

For organizations that publish to Pro or PPU workspaces, the documented route is a Fabric Copilot capacity. A capacity administrator designates an existing F2 or P1 (or larger) capacity in the tenant's home region as a Copilot capacity and assigns users to it. The Fabric documentation, updated October 20, 2026, lists Copilot in Power BI on Pro, PPU and Fabric capacity workspaces, and Copilot in Power BI Desktop, among the experiences that bill to it. Capacities in Embedded license mode cannot be used. The deprecation FAQ adds that Microsoft's approach for Pro licenses is under review, with updates promised but not yet published.

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FABRIC F2 PRICE AND POWER BI LICENSE PRICES.

Microsoft's Power BI pricing page lists Power BI Pro at $14.00 per user per month and Premium Per User at $24.00 per user per month, both paid yearly. Fabric capacity is shown there as variable, and the Azure Fabric pricing page displayed no figures when checked on November 15, 2026. The Azure retail price list for East US showed $0.18 per capacity unit (CU) hour for Fabric capacity usage meters and a one-year reservation price of $938 per CU, which matches the Fabric pricing page's statement that a one- or three-year reservation saves about 41% against pay-as-you-go.

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SKU	CUs	Pay-as-you-go, month	1-year reservation, month
F2	2	$262.80	$156.33
F4	4	$525.60	$312.67
F8	8	$1,051.20	$625.33

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Monthly figures use 730 hours per month for pay-as-you-go and divide the annual reservation price by 12. Prices vary by region, so a capacity outside East US needs its own check in the Azure pricing calculator.

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WORKED EXAMPLE: SIZING COPILOT FOR A 40-USER POWER BI PRO TEAM.

Illustrative scenario. A sales operations team of 40 Power BI Pro users publishes to a Pro workspace and uses a Q&A visual for ad hoc questions. To keep natural language querying after February 2027, the team adds an F2 capacity and designates it as a Fabric Copilot capacity.

Microsoft's Copilot consumption page gives the meter rates: 100 CU seconds per 1,000 input tokens, 10 CU seconds per 1,000 cached input tokens and 400 CU seconds per 1,000 output tokens. Using the request size from Microsoft's own example, 2,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens, one request costs 400 CU seconds. An F2 provides 2 CUs for 24 hours, or 172,800 CU seconds per day, which covers 432 requests of that size before the daily capacity is used up.

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Illustrative usage	Requests per day	CU seconds	Share of F2 day
40 users x 5 questions	200	80,000	46.3%
40 users x 12 questions	480	192,000	111.1%

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At five questions per user per day the F2 runs at less than half its daily budget, and Copilot operations are classified as background jobs that Fabric smooths over 24 hours. At twelve questions per user the demand exceeds what an F2 provides, and the team would need an F4 or would have to accept throttling. The monthly bill for the five-question case is $560.00 in Pro licenses plus $262.80 for the F2 pay-as-you-go, a total of $822.80, or $716.33 with a one-year reservation. The capacity share comes to $6.57 per user per month pay-as-you-go and $3.91 with the reservation.

cu_rate, hours = 0.18, 730
f2_month = cu_rate * 2 * hours                 # 262.80
f2_resv_month = 938 * 2 / 12                   # 156.33
req_cu_s = (2000 * 100 + 500 * 400) / 1000     # 400 CU seconds
f2_day_cu_s = 2 * 24 * 3600                    # 172,800
share_5q = 40 * 5 * req_cu_s / f2_day_cu_s     # 0.463
total = 40 * 14 + f2_month                     # 822.80

Real requests vary in size, and an F2 shared with other workloads leaves less room for Copilot. The Capacity Metrics app gives the measured consumption once Copilot is in use, and our analysis of Fabric data agents on F2 capacity applies the same token arithmetic to a related feature.

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POWER BI Q&A TO COPILOT MIGRATION CHECKS FOR ADMINS.

The first task is an inventory of where Q&A is used: report pages with Q&A visuals or buttons, dashboards whose users rely on the question box, embedded applications and mobile users. The second is a licensing decision for every workspace that hosts those items, because Pro and PPU workspaces need a Fabric Copilot capacity or a move to F2 or larger capacity before Copilot can answer questions there.

Admins should confirm that the Copilot tenant setting is enabled at the tenant level, since the overview states that enabling it only at capacity level is not sufficient, and should check region support before buying capacity. Report designers who maintained synonyms and teach Q&A rules should rebuild that knowledge in Prep data for AI and test the answers, because Copilot output is nondeterministic and Microsoft says these settings cannot guarantee a specific result. Copilot summaries also need checking against the report numbers, a process described in our guide on summarizing Power BI reports with Copilot.

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POWER BI Q&A RETIREMENT AND THE COPILOT CAPACITY DECISION BEFORE FEBRUARY 2027.

Microsoft has confirmed that Q&A visuals, the dashboard question box, mobile and embedded Q&A and all Q&A Setup tools are being retired, with February 2027 as the current month on Microsoft Learn. Copilot for Power BI is the documented replacement, and it requires paid F2 or P1 capacity, which Pro and PPU licenses do not include. For a Pro-only team the smallest documented path costs $262.80 per month pay-as-you-go in East US, or $156.33 per month on a one-year reservation, on top of existing licenses.

Several points depend on tenant and region: whether the tenant setting is on, whether the capacity sits in a supported region and the home region for a Fabric Copilot capacity, and how many questions users actually ask. Five items remain open on Microsoft's side: the new file format that separates Copilot from Q&A, a revised approach for Pro licenses, a Copilot timeline for sovereign clouds, Copilot for embedded PaaS and the migration documentation for existing synonyms. Teams that depend on any of them should plan the February 2027 cutover on the current requirements and treat each later announcement as a possible saving.

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DATA STUDIOS

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