Understanding the Student Use Benefit

The Student Use Benefit is a Microsoft benefit for educational customers where a predefined ratio of students are entitled to use the same or a related service for free, determined by the number of staff who have been licensed for Microsoft 365 suites or services by their organization.

The chart above is derived from the official documentation in the Microsoft Product Terms documents but has been simplified and abridged to include the most relevant products.

In the left column is the service or product that must be licensed for staff members to qualify for student use benefits, which are shown in the center column. These benefits include the suite—or more commonly set of suite subcomponents—which students are entitled to use based on the number of licensed staff members. The asterisk denotes that students are entitled to use “Student Use Benefit” versions of these suites, which frequently omit one or more features included in the same suite for faculty/staff use. 

Two interesting aspects to note are that no Student Use Benefit includes student rights to run Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 on their devices, and the last item where Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise can be substituted for Office Professional Plus. This last scenario is typically forbidden but is explicitly permitted in this one case for education.