Licensing Advent Calendar – Day 2 – Staged timelines

In yesterday’s post, I talked about the history of license enforcement and mentioned a new start date and a staged rollout. In this post, I will elaborate on this to let you be aware of when exactly the enforcement will start in what scenario.

January 15, 2026!

At the end of September 2025, Microsoft announced a new live date and staged timelines for all clients. On and after January 15, 2026, your Dynamics 365 F&O environment will be subject to license enforcement at the moment of a contract renewal or anniversary of the contract.

Whereas the blog is providing clarity, I still hear a lot of questions. Will the enforcement be postponed again? I don’t have an answer on that, but currently, there is no indication that this will happen. There was a wrong release of calculation metadata two weeks ago. This got fixed last week, where the license reporting data in most of the use cases looks to be accurate.

The second question is about the anniversary date. Is this yearly? Yes! This is similar to your birthday. Yearly, you have your anniversary date. Also, remember what will happen in case you forget your wedding day…

In case you have a five year contract started on March 21, 2023, then you have the next dates:

• Anniversary (1): March 21, 2024
• Anniversary (2): March 21, 2025
• Anniversary (3): March 21, 2026
• Anniversary (4): March 21, 2027
• Contract renewal: March 21, 2028

In this case, March 21, 2026 will be the date that the license enforcement will be enabled.

In case the anniversary date or contract renewal date is on January 14, 2026, or earlier, then the license enforcement will be activated in 2027. If I understood correctly, the exact date and time is January 15 at 00:00 UTC. When you are located in Australia and the renewal or anniversary date is January 15, this is still January 14 in the UK. Your enforcement will then also start in 2027.

Other scenarios

There can be a situation where you have multiple contracts for Dynamics 365. In that case, you have multiple anniversary or renewal dates in 2026. The first of these dates after January 15 will be the date that the license enforcement will be applicable to you.

Before the postponement of the license enforcement to January 2026, there was a year of grace period in case you had your contract renewal between April and September 2025. This will continue to be honored, even if you had another contract renewal upcoming earlier than the 365 days of grace period.

Enforcement

Above, we learned on what date the license enforcement will start. This date is noted as “T”. The license enforcement will not directly start; there are some steps before and after the T-date.

About 90 days before, you can start negotiations with your licensing partner to discuss new quantities and terms. Then, 30 days before the start of the enforcement, users will receive an in-app warning in case they are missing a license.

From the enforcement start date, there is a grace period of 15 days before users without a license assigned will be locked out of the application. This period is to ensure that last-minute license purchases can be applied to the users.

Regardless of your enforcement start date, I recommend starting early to see if you are compliant or what actions should be taken. The coming posts will be about the available licensing reports and what you should do to avoid purchasing additional licenses when they are not required. There might be lots of options to reconfigure security roles to avoid high operational costs.

There is more…

During the Advent period, each day in December, I will share some thoughts and tips related to the Dynamics 365 user license enforcement. If you have questions about this topic, feel free to contact me via LinkedIn, the comments section below, or the contact form on this blog. I will then either update one of the planned blogs for the coming 24 days or answer questions in a new post.

Dynamics 365 Licensing Enforcement Advent Calendar

I do hope you liked this post and will add value for you in your daily work as a professional. If you have related questions or feedback, don’t hesitate to use the Comment feature below.


That’s all for now. Till next time!