For the last two years (or more) that High Volume Email (HVE) has been in preview in Exchange Online it has been a free to use service. From June 1st 2026 it will cost $42 per million recipients (internal, it does not deliver to external recipients) and is billed via an Azure subscription.
So how do we configure all the bits. We start with the Exchange Online admin portal at https://admin.cloud.microsoft/exchange > Mail Flow > High Volume Email and we see a new message about requiring a billing policy. If it is past June 1st 2026 and you do not have a policy in place for an account, that account will no longer work and you will see a message saying “Not active”.
Before you assign a billing policy to an HVE account, ensure that Microsoft 365 pay as you go billing is set up for your tenant. If you have this in place for an existing HVE account you can just click the Connect a policy link to the right of the account name. Each account needs a policy and each account can have its own policy, and therefore its own billing, or share a policy or something inbetween. Note though that one HVE account cannot have more than one policy – you cannot share billing across policies.
In the above screen I have no available policies, so there is nothing to select in the “Select billing policy” drop-down. The General tab contains the HVE settings and this I have covered elsewhere. In the event there is an issue with the billing policy then this will show an error state here as well.
To configure HVE billing, navigate to the M365 Admin Center at https://admin.cloud.microsoft/ > Billing > Pay-as-you-go.
From the M365 Billing pay-as-you-go portal, add or update an existing billing policy. The flyout will ask for a name and then three Microsoft Azure values. In my example below I am going to create one policy for all my HVE accounts, so I have named it “All High Volume Billing” and I have selected an existing Azure subscription, resource group and region. You can make a new subscription, resource group and select whatever region makes sense to you.
You can also assign multiple services to a single billing policy, but that makes tracing spend a little harder, so separate policies per service is probably the best idea.
As this is tied to Microsoft 365 billing, a name that indicates what the resource it that is being billed is a good idea – the person in charge of billing might not know what you mean by HVE, so I have opted to include “email” in the name. Your final option, not shown in the above screenshot, is to accept the terms of the pay-as-you-go billing service and click Next.
The second page is the Choose Users page where you will select who can use this billing profile. You need to ensure that any group you select would contain the Exchange Administrator who is setting up the billing policy. If is not the persons paying the bill – that is managed by the Azure subscription settings. You need to select the user of the policy here.
Page three of the pay-as-you-go billing policy creation allows you to set budgets. Now HVE is $0.000042 per recipient, so its unlikely to hit any budget, but just in case of run away code or agent, you can set a policy here as well as who gets notified and at what percent and on what day the budget resets. So below is a monthly budget of £5 with alerts to IT Support on 50%, 75% and 100% of budget.
The final page sumarizes the policy settings and allows you to create the policy.
Once the policy is made you need to connect it to the High Volume Email service or you will not see the policy available in the Exchange Admin Center.
Note the other services that are listed. You can do pay-as-you-go billing for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Backup. Save the changes and return to the Exchange Online Admin Center.
Back in the Exchange Admin Center click the Refresh button to load up the newly connected billing policy:
In writing this blog, it took a while for the Exchange Online Admin Center to show, even with full browser refreshes, that there was a billing policy in place even though the flyout was showing the selected policy. I needed to confirm the policy and configuration via PowerShell before I was able to see the status correctly in the Exchange Admin Portal.
To configure HVE billing using PowerShell you need to connect to Exchange Online. To view the available billing policies use Get-BillingPolicy -ResourceType HVE. To view the policy assigned to a HVE account use Get-HVEAccountBillingPolicy -Identity HVEAccount_01@contoso.com. Using this showed me an error “BillingPolicyMismatched” and “The specified billing policy is mismatched to requested data.”
Microsoft documentation for this error helpfully says “This is an uncommon scenario” and that this particular error does not show itself in the admin portal!
I had created a billing policy in the Azure Region “UK West” becuase I was given a choice during policy creation, but the resource group I had previously selected was in “UK South” – so I suspect that this is the issue though I was unable to prove this as fixing it involved creating a new policy as I was unable to edit anything apart from the name whilst the policy was connected to the HVE account in Exchange Online, and I could not change the HVE account to a new policy becuase I did not have one to hand. I also could not create a new billing policy in the previous resource group as you are limited to one billing policy per resource group. So in the end I made a new billing policy in a new resource group, and both the resource group and policy were placed in the same Azure region as that was easiest thing to do.
But that is it all in place, and importantly in place before billing starts on 1st June 2026.
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