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Reactivate a disabled Azure subscription

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Your Azure subscription can get disabled because your credit has expired, you reached your spending limit, have an overdue bill, hit your credit card limit, or because the subscription was canceled by the Account Administrator. See what issue applies to you and follow the steps in this article to get your subscription reactivated.

Your credit is expired

When you sign up for an Azure free account, you get a Free Trial subscription, which provides you $200 Azure credit in your billing currency for 30 days and 12 months of free services. At the end of 30 days, Azure disables your subscription. Your subscription is disabled to protect you from accidentally incurring charges for usage beyond the credit and free services included with your subscription. To continue using Azure services, you must upgrade your subscription. After you upgrade, your subscription still has access to free services for 12 months. You only get charged for usage beyond the free service quantity limits.

You reached your spending limit

Azure subscriptions with credit such as Free Trial and Visual Studio Enterprise have spending limits on them. You can only use services up to the included credit. When your usage reaches the spending limit, Azure disables your subscription for the rest of that billing period. Your subscription is disabled to protect you from accidentally incurring charges for usage beyond the credit included with your subscription. To remove your spending limit, see Remove the spending limit in the Azure portal.

Note

If you have a Free Trial subscription and you remove the spending limit, your subscription converts to an individual subscription with pay-as-you-go rates at the end of the Free Trial. You keep your remaining credit for the full 30 days after you created the subscription. You also have access to free services for 12 months.

To monitor and manage billing activity for Azure, see Plan to manage Azure costs.

Your bill is past due

To resolve a past due balance, see one of the following articles:

The bill exceeds your credit card limit

To resolve the issue, switch to a different credit card. Or if you're representing a business, you can switch to pay by invoice.

The subscription was accidentally canceled

If you're the Account Administrator and accidentally canceled a pay-as-you-go subscription, you can reactivate it in the Azure portal.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. Go to Subscriptions and then select the canceled subscription.
  3. Select Reactivate.
    Screenshot that shows Confirm reactivation.

For other subscription types, contact support to have your subscription reactivated.

After reactivation

After your subscription is reactivated, there might be a delay in creating or managing resources. If the delay exceeds 30 minutes, contact Azure Billing Support for assistance. Most Azure resources automatically resume and don't require any action. However, we recommend that you check your Azure service resources and restart any that don't resume automatically.

Upgrade a disabled free account

If you use resources that aren’t free and your subscription gets disabled because you run out of credit, and then you upgrade your subscription, the resources get enabled after upgrade. This situation will result in you getting charged for the resources used. For more information about upgrading a free account, see Upgrade your Azure account.

Need help? Contact us.

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

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