Microsoft Teams Retires Live Events in July, Overhauls Licensing

Microsoft's Teams Virtual Events platform is in the middle of a significant transition in 2026, with one of its core broadcast formats on its way out and licensing reshaped for what remains.

According to Microsoft's documentation on Teams live events, Teams live events will retire in July 2026. Events already scheduled will remain supported through February 28, 2027. Microsoft is directing customers toward Teams town halls as the replacement, the format now carrying the platform's large-audience feature set.

Town halls support up to 3,000 attendees with full interactivity and up to 10,000 in a view-only mode. For organizations that need to go bigger, Attendee Capacity Pack add-on licenses allow scaling to 100,000 participants. The engagement toolkit includes chat, moderated Q&A, reactions, polling, captions, and multi-lingual support, as described on Microsoft's Teams Events product page.

The licensing picture also shifted in April. As of April 1, 2026, some features previously only available with Teams Premium are now included with Teams Enterprise, priced at $8.55 per user per month annually. Teams Premium continues to cover advanced meeting protection, branding and personalization, and intelligence capabilities, per Microsoft's Teams overview documentation. The honest caveat is that the documentation itself does not enumerate exactly which event features moved to the lower tier, so organizations need to audit their own feature dependencies before assuming costs drop.

What the reporting doesn't surface is how migration from live events to town halls is going in practice, or what the per-seat math works out to for large-scale event organizers weighing Attendee Capacity Packs against dedicated webinar platforms. The July retirement date is the deadline worth tracking.