Create a Microsoft Customer Agreement subscription

This article helps you create a Microsoft Customer Agreement subscription for yourself or for someone else in your current Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) directory/tenant. You may want another subscription to avoid hitting subscription quota limits, to create separate environments for security, or to isolate data for compliance reasons.

If you want to create a Microsoft Customer Agreement subscription in a different Azure AD tenant, see Create an MCA subscription request.

If you want to create subscriptions for Enterprise Agreements, see Create an EA subscription. If you're a Microsoft Partner and you want to create a subscription for a customer, see Create a subscription for a partner's customer. Or, if you have a Microsoft Online Service Program (MOSP) billing account, also called pay-as-you-go, you can create subscriptions starting in the Azure portal and then you complete the process at https://signup.azure.com/.

To learn more about billing accounts and identify your billing account type, see View billing accounts in Azure portal.

Permission required to create Azure subscriptions

You need the following permissions to create subscriptions for a Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA):

  • Owner or contributor role on the invoice section, billing profile or billing account. Or Azure subscription creator role on the invoice section.

For more information, see Subscription billing roles and task.

Create a subscription

Use the following procedure to create a subscription for yourself or for someone in the current Azure Active Directory. When you're done, the new subscription is created immediately.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. Navigate to Subscriptions and then select Add.
    Screenshot showing the Subscription page where you Add a subscription.
  3. On the Create a subscription page, on the Basics tab, type a Subscription name.
  4. Select the Billing account where the new subscription will get created.
  5. Select the Billing profile where the subscription will get created.
  6. Select the Invoice section where the subscription will get created.
  7. Next to Plan, select Microsoft Azure Plan for DevTest if the subscription will be used for development or testing workloads. Otherwise, select Microsoft Azure Plan.
    Screenshot showing the Basics tab where you enter basic information about the subscription.
  8. Select the Advanced tab.
  9. Select your Subscription directory. It's the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) where the new subscription will get created.
  10. Select a Management group. It's the Azure AD management group that the new subscription is associated with. You can only select management groups in the current directory.
  11. Select one or more Subscription owners. You can select only users or service principals in the selected subscription directory. You can't select guest directory users. If you select a service principal, enter its App ID.
    Screenshot showing the Advanced tab where you can specify the directory, management group, and owner.
  12. Select the Tags tab.
  13. Enter tag pairs for Name and Value.
    Screenshot showing the tags tab where you enter tag and value pairs.
  14. Select Review + create. You should see a message stating Validation passed.
  15. Verify that the subscription information is correct, then select Create. You'll see a notification that the subscription is getting created.

After the new subscription is created, the owner of the subscription can see it in on the Subscriptions page.

Can't view subscription

If you created a subscription but can't find it in the Subscriptions list view, a view filter might be applied.

To clear the filter and view all subscriptions:

  1. In the Azure portal, navigate to Subscriptions.
  2. At the top of the list, select the Subscriptions filter item.
  3. At the top of the subscriptions filter box, select All. At the bottom of the subscriptions filter box, clear Show only subscriptions selected in the global subscriptions filter.
    Screenshot showing the Subscriptions filter box with options.
  4. Select Apply to close the box and refresh the list of subscriptions.

Create an Azure subscription programmatically

You can also create subscriptions programmatically. For more information, see Create Azure subscriptions programmatically.

Need help? Contact us.

If you have questions or need help, create a support request.

Next steps