Office Work At Home License Less Valuable

The Office Work At Home (WAH) license provides a less expensive way for volume licensing customers to license an employee’s home PC for business use compared to purchasing a traditional Office Standard or Professional Plus edition suite license. However, recent changes make WAH use rights more restrictive, diminishing the value while adding a small incentive for customers to instead license the Office suite through Office 365 and its per-user subscription-based licensing model.

Work At Home License Terms

Two Office suite editions for Windows, both licensed on a per-device basis, can be purchased through volume licensing programs: Standard edition and Professional Plus edition. If an organization acquires either edition for an employee’s workplace PC through either Select or Enterprise volume purchase agreements, the organization can purchase, under the same volume licensing contract, an associated WAH license to run the identical edition of Office on the employee’s home computer. There are two editions of the WAH for the Windows OS, Standard and Professional Plus, and each costs approximately half the corresponding original license price. A third license, WAH for Mac Office, is similarly priced as WAH Standard edition.