Office 365 Personal and Home to lift device install limits in October

By Dan Thorp-Lancaster
published

Office 365 is getting a little easier to manage for those of us with way too many devices.

Laptop with Office 365
Laptop with Office 365 (Image credit: Windows Central)

Office 365 is preparing to lift its device limit restriction in October for Home and Personal subscribers. As things currently operate, Home subscribers are limited to installing Office apps on ten devices, while Personal users can only install them on one. Starting October 2 (opens in new tab), these limits are going away, albeit with a couple of caveats.

While you'll be able to install Office on an unlimited number of devices with any Home, Personal, or University account, you'll only be able to stay signed in to up to five devices at a time. If you try to sign into a sixth device, you'll be prompted to sign out of another one before you can continue, according to Microsoft's FAQ (opens in new tab) on the change. Essentially, you'll lose out on some subscription features on devices where you're signed out, so you'll want to stay signed in on the ones you use the most.

In addition to the abolition of device limits, Office 365 Home subscribers are getting an added bonus. The subscription currently allows you to acquire licenses for up to five people. On October 2, the license limit will expand to six, allowing you to share benefits with another person at the same price. Each person will continue to receive licenses for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. Subscriptions also include 1TB of OneDrive storage for each person.

Office 365 subscriptions are available through Microsoft (opens in new tab) at a cost of $99.99 per year for Home or $69.99 per year for Personal.

See at Microsoft (opens in new tab)

Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. 

17 Comments
  • Got a One year home subscription (I think) with my Surface Go bundle. Haven't activated it yet...this change will come in handy.
  • The best part is office mobile apps for devices having less than 10.1' Screen size is completely free.
    Technically, every surface go user has free access to office mobile apps available in the store
  • That's utter BS even my phones REQUIRE an Office 365 subscription.
  • Was hoping the 2GB that Google was offering would've prompted a match from MS. Guess that's still not happening. Too bad. Though I do like that a 6th user is an option now. Good stuff.
  • What do you mean "...2GB that Google was offering..."? You get 1TB of OneDrive storage with Office 365, blows that 2GB offering right out of the water!!!!
  • If you use Office a lot, sure does.
  • I hope a new major Office version is part of it.
  • Continuous updates are included with any subscription, so yes.
  • "If you try to sign into a sixth device, you'll be prompted to sign out of another one before you can continue," You can do this now. Go to your account and deactivate a device and you can sign into a different one. What would be really nice if you could stack Office subscriptions, rather than just extend them. I could use more than 5 myself. My wife wishes she could buy more OneDrive, that is contiguous. She knows she can get two Personal (or Home) ones but those are against different accounts. You can't sync more than one personal OneDrive. (Why not? BTW) They did something like this before and took it away. I'm not getting too comfortable with it.
  • This is great! Now my mom can use Excel on her computer!
  • Is Office 365 managed thru the Store? I have an Office 365 Personal subscription. I do have Word 2016 and Excel 2016 loaded, but not the version supplied by the Office 365 Personal subscription. I am thinking if the Store manage Office 365 subscriptions, it will manage all Office updates. So, come October should I uninstall Word 2016 and Excel 2016 and install it from the Store? Is OneNote in the Store?
  • This is AWESOME. My wife and I had already hit the limit with the Home subscription (with all the PCs, phones and tablets we had).
  • This is great stuff!
  • Not currently using that many devices (only three), still this is great news.
  • Split the monthly payments between 6 people, and it might end up being cheaper than buying the software every few years. This could be a game change for those of us opposed to subscription software.
  • Could do this with the 5 already if you wanted. Is the difference between $20 and $16.66 what makes the difference? Who gets to be in charge? SomeOne buys the package and assigns licenses to the other 4/5, and is in charge of turning them on or off. BTW, it is already cheaper than buying the software every few years assuming you buy a package that has all the applications and services.
  • I hope other Office 365 plans get similar upgrades? My family has O365 ProPlus, which lets 5 PCs install the version of Microsoft Outlook that can access the Online Archive feature of our Exchange Online Plan 2 mailboxes (the ProPlus suite also installs OneDrive Business and Skype Business, but they just use the consumer versions). We also have O365 Home for 5 additional PC installs. (In fact I also added 3 more Home subscriptions for relatives and their computers.) Allowing more machines per person will hopefully let us simplify our family subscriptions, but we still want access to the mailbox Online Archive in Outlook?