Change the Azure spending limit

When you create a Microsoft Azure subscription through a member offer-- the MSDN benefit or the Microsoft Partner Network Cloud Essentials program, for example--a spending limit of 0 is turned on automatically. The spending limit helps ensure you don’t get charged when the credits on your subscription run out. The spending limit feature isn’t available for other subscription types such as the Free Trial offer, pay-as-you-go subscriptions, and commitment plans.

With the spending limit turned on, when your credits are used up, Azure de-provisions subscription resources so you don’t get charged--for example, cloud services that you deployed are removed from production and your Azure virtual machines are stopped and de-allocated. Wherever possible, data and settings are maintained, and administrators have read-only access to data in storage and databases so they can redeploy services when the subscription is re-activated. However, services and resources may lose important settings like virtual IP addresses (VIPs) when they are de-provisioned.

Warning

Because some settings tied to the physical instances of your services may be lost, if you run important or essential services through your subscription, remove the spending limit to help ensure service and data continuity.

If you remove the spending limit, Azure begins charging for services at the pay-as-you-go rate when your credits are used up. Charges continue until credits become available for use at the next billing cycle, or until you turn on the spending limit again.

Change the spending limit

If your subscription has a spending limit, a yellow banner appears under its listing in the Subscriptions area of the Account Center. To view subscription information here, you must be the Account Administrator. If there’s no yellow banner, the subscription isn’t eligible for a spending limit.

Click the text in the banner to change how the spending limit is applied. You can’t change the amount of the spending limit. It’s always 0.

Important

If you remove the spending limit, the earliest you can turn it back on is at the start of the next billing cycle.

Your options when you change the spending limit:

Selection	Effect
Remove spending limit indefinitely	Removes the spending limit without turning it on automatically at the start of the next billing period.
Remove spending limit for the current billing period	Removes the spending limit so it turns on automatically at the start of the next billing period.
Turn on spending limit in the next billing period <start date of billing period>	Available only when the spending limit has been removed indefinitely, changes it to turn on automatically at the start of the next billing period.
Keep my current spending limit option	Cancels the change and leaves the spending limit as-is.