Licensing needed for User(s) and Direct Routing

These are the licenses or license combinations that a user needs in order to use Microsoft Direct Routing; the general requirement is that both Teams and Phone System are needed. Direct Routing setup also requires that one of these license / license combinations are available (unassigned), but once it is set up you can recoup the license(s) assigned to the Direct Routing user. 

A license from the Inclusive License list, or two licenses (one with Teams, one with Phone System) from the License Combination lists will work.   Some examples are listed in this summary table; the full list of licenses is at the end of this article.

Note that other licenses may work: our system will dynamically evaluate license contents when an Enterprise commences Direct Routing setup and adds suitable licenses to the lists when new Microsoft licenses are encountered.

When purchasing phone add-on licenses we recommend purchasing ones that do NOT include the Microsoft Calling Plan because it is costly and not needed with ConnectToTeams. Additionally, the Calling Plan can interfere with the provisioning process and cause delays. As of June 2022 Microsoft is in the process of retiring the "Business Voice" licenses. The most appropriate replacement for this license is "Microsoft Teams Phone Standard." Microsoft's documentation is aggressively promoting the (more expensive) license with Calling Plan. Do not accept the upselling attempts.

Example of Teams licenses in Microsoft's documentation, with prices shown in USD