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.
Each role contains the one below it.
Builds Planning sheets, sets rules and write-back destinations.
Enters and changes plan numbers, approves, builds PowerTables and Intelligence sheets.
Views data, sorts, filters, bookmarks.
How roles are assigned
You do not pre-assign roles. Everyone starts as a Viewer, and the system upgrades them automatically based on what they do. Only one kind of action makes a Planner; almost everything else is Stakeholder work:
- Opening any item to look at it, whether a Planning sheet, a PowerTable or an Intelligence sheet, keeps them a Viewer.
- Almost everything else makes them a Stakeholder: entering or changing plan numbers, approving, writing back, and creating or editing PowerTables and Intelligence sheets.
- Only creating a Planning sheet, or editing a Planning sheet's design (its structure, rules or write-back destinations), makes them a Planner.
Since August 19, 2026, building a PowerTable data app or an Intelligence report no longer makes anyone a Planner. One documented exception: Microsoft's roles page also says creating a new plan item upgrades the creator to Planner, so budget one Planner session for whoever sets an item up (see the FAQ).
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. The lower session closes, prorated, when the upgrade happens. 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's billing post for Fabric Planning, and Microsoft Learn's Roles in planning in Fabric and Billing and usage for planning in Fabric, as checked on September 12, 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, which in our reading is meant to keep broad consumption cheap.
Everything a Viewer can do, plus almost every hands-on action.
Stakeholders enter data, create scenarios and simulations, approve, comment, and write back. They also build PowerTable data apps and Intelligence reports and dashboards. What they cannot do is change the structure of a Planning sheet. This is the role for department heads, business leads, data stewards, and report builders.
Everything a Stakeholder can do, plus Planning sheet authoring.
Planners create and edit Planning sheets: model structure, business rules, forecasts, and write-back destinations. They act as authors and modelers with administrative privileges. This is the role for the FP&A team and model owners who design the plan and run the cycle.
Nobody hands out these roles. Every session opens at the bottom step, and the action does the promoting.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Creates Planning sheets or edits their design: structure, business rules, write-back destinations | Planner | 1.16 CU |
| Enters or changes plan numbers, writes back, approves, comments, runs scenarios | Stakeholder | 0.23 CU |
| Creates or edits PowerTables or Intelligence sheets | Stakeholder | 0.23 CU |
| Only opens items to look: Planning sheets, PowerTables, Intelligence sheets | 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 create Planning sheets or edit their design 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 active users and you have the capacity your planning workload occupies; the calculator 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 a Planning sheet. For the full costing questions (what a sustained CU is, when billing starts, overage behavior, and how this compares to traditional EPM licensing), see the FAQ.