Fabric Planning roles
Fabric Planning bills by role, and the role decides both what a user can do and what they cost. Three roles cover everyone: Viewer, Stakeholder, and Planner. This page explains what each role can do, who in your organization should hold it, how roles get assigned, and how each one hits your capacity bill. If you are sizing a deployment, the capacity calculator turns these roles into an F-SKU recommendation.
How roles are assigned
You do not pre-assign roles. When a user opens a planning session, they start at the minimum: Viewer. The system upgrades them automatically as they take higher-privilege actions:
- Viewing only keeps them a Viewer.
- Entering data or writing back makes them a Stakeholder.
- Authoring, modeling, or admin actions make them a Planner.
Two billing consequences follow. First, a user who holds multiple roles in the same capacity is billed once, at the highest role only. Second, a role upgrade starts a new 30-day session at the higher role. Once a session opens, its full 30 days are a billing commitment; closing it early does not reduce the cost. In practice: the actions your users take set your bill, so knowing who needs to do what is the sizing exercise.
Source: Microsoft'sbilling post for Fabric Planning and direct confirmation from the Fabric Planning product team, July 2026.
The three roles
The roles form a ladder. Each tier includes everything below it.
Read-only, in reading view.
Viewers can view data, sort, filter, and bookmark. This is the role for executives, decision-makers, and anyone who consumes plans, dashboards, and forecasts without touching the numbers. It is priced low on purpose: Microsoft wants broad consumption to be cheap.
Everything a Viewer can do, plus data entry and collaboration.
Stakeholders enter data, create scenarios and simulations, approve, comment, and write back. They stay in reading view: they can change the numbers, and they cannot change the model. This is the role for department heads, business leads, and operational contributors who shape outcomes during a planning cycle.
Everything a Stakeholder can do, plus edit mode.
Planners create and edit artifacts, build and manage data models, configure planning logic and rules, and administer security and permissions. This is the role for the FP&A team, analysts, and model owners who design the framework and run the cycle.
Who should hold which role
A plan administrator can hand this table to HR or IT when provisioning users.
| If this person... | They are a... | Cost weight |
|---|---|---|
| Builds or changes the planning model, configures rules, administers the app | Planner | 1.16 CU |
| Enters data, writes back, approves, comments, runs scenarios | Stakeholder | 0.23 CU |
| Only reviews outputs | Viewer | 0.05 CU |
The one decision that dominates cost: broad bottom-up data entry belongs at Stakeholder, at roughly one fifth of the Planner rate. Only the people who change the model itself need Planner. A deployment that hands Planner to every contributor pays roughly five times more per user than it needs to.
How roles hit the bill
Each role holds a sustained slice of your Fabric capacity for the length of a 30-day session. A Planner holds 1.16 CU, a Stakeholder 0.23 CU, a Viewer 0.05 CU. Add up the sustained CU of your concurrent users and you have the capacity your planning workload occupies; thecalculator does this for you and recommends an F-SKU.
Billing is for active sessions only. A user who never opens a plan item costs nothing, and off-season months with no engagement create no sessions and no charge. When engagement does open a session, the 30 days are committed.
To see how this plays out on a calendar,watch what happens when a user changes roles over 30 days as they go from looking, to entering data, to building. For the full costing questions (what a sustained CU is, when billing starts, overage behavior, and how this compares to traditional EPM licensing), see theFAQ.