Microsoft published an update on Wednesday, August 19. Creating and editing PowerTable sheets and Intelligence sheets no longer moves you up to the Planner rung, and guess what, everybody has that use case. Everybody has a customer list and a chart of accounts that somebody keeps clean, and until Wednesday that person carried the top rate in my sizing models.
The whole rule
Planner, 1.16 CU. Create or edit the planning sheet itself, including telling it where it writes back to. That is the only thing on this list.
Stakeholder, 0.23 CU. Everything else. Create a PowerTable sheet, edit it, enter data into it. Create an Intelligence sheet, edit it, add data and use it. Comment, approve, run scenarios. And enter data into a planning sheet, which was always Stakeholder work and still is.
Viewer, 0.05 CU. Open a plan and look at it, and nothing else.
That’s it. Building is Stakeholder work now, unless the thing you’re building is the plan.
Figure 1. The rule on one card, if you want to send it to whoever owns your capacity. The middle band is the whole story. Until August 19, creating or editing a PowerTable or an Intelligence sheet put that person at 1.16 CU, and now it doesn’t.
What I clicked
I ran it in a trial workspace, watching the role indicator after every action.
Figure 2. Four rows of Stakeholder, then the flip. Everything above the last row used to cost 1.16 CU.
I had a plan artifact from before, so I started as a Viewer just by opening one, and that is where all your consumers of Fabric Plan sit. When I created the PowerTable sheet and connected it to the database I became a Stakeholder, and before Wednesday that would have made me a Planner. I became a Planner only when I created a planning sheet with a write-back destination.
What it changes
0.23 is about a fifth of 1.16, so the same PowerTable work runs at roughly $30 an active month at US list instead of roughly $152, or $18 against $90 on reservation. Nothing else moved. In Microsoft’s own words, there’s no new meter, no new rate, and no new SKU.
If you’re already running a planning cycle, your numbers don’t change, because your Planners were planning sheet authors already. What changes is everybody you were counting as a Planner because they maintain reference data. Count them as Stakeholders now, and if you’re standing up PowerTable on its own, you can provision a plan item with no planning sheets in it at all.
I’m updating the calculator and the roles page at fabricplanning.io early next week to match.
I’m super excited because I can’t think of anybody who doesn’t have this use case.
Planning in Microsoft Fabric IQ reached general availability on July 28, 2026, and billing started August 1, 2026. The persona change here was published August 19, 2026. My walkthrough was one session on a trial capacity, using the in-product role indicator rather than the Capacity Metrics app. Microsoft’s billing and roles pages on Microsoft Learn are both still labeled Preview, so verify with Microsoft before committing budget. Microsoft publishes no per-role dollar rate, so the figures here are derived from Microsoft’s published US pay-as-you-go capacity list prices and vary by region, and the reservation figures come from Microsoft’s documented reserved discount.
Sources: Billing personas for PowerTable within Planning in Fabric IQ (Generally Available), Supriya Kashyap, Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog, August 19, 2026. Roles in Fabric plan, Microsoft Learn. Earlier in this series: Understanding Fabric Planning cost and Fabric Planning went GA on Tuesday and the meter starts Saturday.
