Microsoft 365 is making a big cut to your OneDrive storage perk

Microsoft is taking away one of the biggest perks that came with subscribing to its Microsoft 365 Family or Premium plan. I personally do not have a subscription, though I have thought about paying for one in the past. Not because of the Copilot perks, or the Office apps that come bundled, but because of the generous OneDrive cloud storage. Unfortunately, Microsoft is changing how that storage perk works.

Up until recently, both Microsoft 365 Family and Premium plans have allowed users to share their subscription with five additional people, with each person receiving 1TB of personal OneDrive cloud storage. That equals a combined 6TB of storage for the entire household. The sharing will still go on. Nothing is changing on that front. However, the total amount of combined storage available is being slashed all the way down to 2TB, the company quietly announced in a support post.

So, while previously everyone in the shared membership got to utilize their personal allocated 1TB of cloud storage, they’ll now have to collectively share a single 2TB pool.

The change does have one thing going for it: If you never shared your subscription in the first place, you would have, anyway, been limited to 1TB of cloud storage. With the new change, you’re actually getting double the storage.

Families with maxed-out allocations will feel the cut

Still, there’s no sugarcoating the change, as it does have more negatives than positives. For starters, you could have worked around the 1TB solo storage limit by creating burner accounts. Five burner accounts, plus your main account, would have given you access to the full 6TB. You can’t do that now.

The bigger problem is for families, especially those with six total members that have been sharing the subscription for a while. In a scenario where all six members have maxed out their individual 1TB allocation, decisions will need to be made, considering that they’ll collectively have 4TB more data than the new shared storage limit would allow. You’ll then have to either delete years’ worth of data, move it around, or pay Microsoft more for additional storage.

There’s no real silver lining here, but at least you won’t have to make your decision immediately. For existing users, the new storage limits will kick in after their first subscription renewal on or after May 2, 2027. New users, on the other hand, will have to make do with the new 2TB pool starting now.