Microsoft 365 Family switched to 2TB shared instead of 1TB per member as before

If you use the Microsoft 365 Family package, each family member will have 1 TB of cloud storage available, along with the use of Microsoft's Office package, this package is delicious, guys. But it's about to end when Microsoft has just announced that it will change this division, in the context of hard drive prices rising sharply and storage supply being scarce. With this change, Microsoft will move Family, Premium and Pro plans from 1TB per person to a shared 2TB storage for the entire account. The Personal package is not on the affected list. In addition, this change applies when you renew after April 2027 and Microsoft itself also said that the subscription price remains unchanged, so on the surface this is a change in division, not a price increase.

Cutting capacity per capita is Microsoft's way of pushing the cost of scarcity onto users without touching the price list

First, the reason Microsoft gave sounds quite reasonable: when each person has their own 1TB, the person who only uses 50GB will waste the remaining capacity, and the person who uses more than 1TB will run out of space while there is still a lot of space in the family. Pooling into 2 TB allows the remaining capacity of one person to be used for the other, and the additional capacity purchased, if any, can also be used for the whole family. However, this prescriptive explanation is only beneficial for a family with three light users and one person saves a whole photo or video library, the rest are uncertain.

And of course this argument holds for those families as it stands on the assumption that heavy users are a minority. However, if it's four users with 500GB each and a total of 2TB, that just hits the ceiling and anyone who needs more has to buy additional capacity, which starts at $1.99 per month for 200GB. And if you want your own 2TB on the Personal package, users have to pay an additional $9.99 per month, equivalent to $119.88 per year. And if you put it on a comparison table, Family costs $129.99 and Personal costs $99.99 per year. Therefore, the price may stay the same, but the value received will change: for families with heavy users, the actual cost increases, it's just that it's in the additional purchase instead of in the package price. Additionally, the hardware context also explains why Microsoft chose the time to introduce this change. First, HDD prices have increased 46% from September 2025 to January 2026. A 30TB enterprise SSD now costs $22,600, and the supply of this type of drive is sold out until 2027. A storage service will need a lot of hard drives to meet user demand, so each TB provided is much more expensive than before. Therefore, cutting the capacity allocated to each account is the fastest way to reduce the number of drives that must be purchased, and also helps reduce the load on Microsoft's storage system. Additionally, some subscribers may receive additional storage when switching to the shared storage, but Microsoft hasn't said what the conditions are.

Each hosting service is having to adapt in different ways

Microsoft isn't the only service having to change, Google is said to have reduced free storage from 15GB to 5GB, with additional security measures. Or before that, you also remember that Apple chose to increase the price of iCloud + packages. These adaptations differ in who suffers. While Microsoft chose to push the burden on users with a lot of capacity, Apple chose to increase prices for all, while Google chose to reduce the free package so the least paying users bear the burden.

Finally, this Microsoft policy still has some unclear things. First, Microsoft said that some people will receive additional capacity when switching to shared use, but the company has not specified the conditions as to who gets it and how much it is unclear. In addition, the application deadline is still unclear as some sources say it is May 2027. Finally, it is unknown how many users this change will affect, but those using the Family package should also consider other solutions if the cost and impact on your needs are too great.