Governance and administration

Implementing Power BI Premium Capacity

How to actually set up a Power BI Premium capacity: choosing an F SKU, assigning workspaces, and monitoring usage in the Fabric admin portal.

Austin Levine

Updated

September 23, 2026

Setting up a Power BI Premium capacity means buying a Fabric F SKU in Azure, assigning workspaces to it, and monitoring the compute it uses. A capacity is a block of dedicated compute you rent from Microsoft, sized in capacity units (CUs) that determine how much load it can handle. This post assumes you have already decided you need a capacity; if not, see Power BI Premium capacity first for that decision. What follows are the actual steps once you are ready to build one.

Before you start, confirm two things. First, you or someone on your team needs billing access to the Azure subscription that will pay for the capacity; you need it in Step 2. Second, you need the capacity contributor role on the capacity and the workspace admin role on the workspaces you plan to move; you need both in Step 3.

Step 1: choose an F SKU size

Base the SKU size on two things: how many viewers you need to cover without individual Pro licenses, and whether you plan to run non-Power-BI Fabric workloads such as lakehouses or pipelines.

If your only goal is letting free-license users view Power BI content, you need at least F64. The number after "F" indicates the SKU's compute size in capacity units (CUs): F64 means 64 CUs, and a larger number means more capacity. F64 is also the threshold where the free-viewer rule applies; anything smaller still requires Pro or PPU for every viewer.
If you also plan to run Fabric workloads, any F size supports them, so size for the workload's compute needs rather than for the viewing threshold alone.

Price the SKU for your region on the Fabric pricing page before committing; see our cost breakdown for how to compare it against licensing everyone on Pro instead.

Step 2: purchase the capacity in Azure

Buy the capacity through the Azure portal, choosing between pay-as-you-go billing, which charges per second with no commitment, and a one-year reservation, which is cheaper if you expect to run the capacity continuously. A newly purchased capacity shows up in the Fabric admin portal right away.

Step 3: assign workspaces to the capacity

Workspaces start out on your tenant's shared capacity. To move one:

Go to the admin portal's Workspaces list.
Find the workspace and open its options menu.
Choose Reassign workspace.
Select the Fabric workspace type and the capacity to assign it to.

This requires both the capacity contributor role on the capacity and the workspace admin role on the workspace being moved. Plan a short maintenance window for the move; reassigning a workspace can briefly interrupt scheduled refreshes running against it.

Step 4: monitor usage with the Fabric capacity metrics app

Install the Microsoft Fabric capacity metrics app from Microsoft AppSource. Once installed, it shows capacity unit (CU) consumption broken down by workspace, so you can see which reports or refreshes are driving usage and check consumption before and after moving a workspace onto the capacity. Watch for sustained CU usage near 100 percent, which is the signal to either optimize a heavy semantic model or move up to the next SKU size.

A note on rollout

The one piece of generic advice worth keeping specific to Power BI: tell your report viewers about the F64 threshold before you move workspaces around. A viewer who previously needed Pro and now has only a free license will lose access if their workspace ends up on a capacity smaller than F64, or if their viewer role was never set correctly during the move. That single detail causes most of the support tickets after a capacity rollout.

FAQs

How do I move a workspace onto a Fabric capacity?

In the admin portal, open the Workspaces list, select the workspace, choose Reassign workspace, and pick the Fabric workspace type and target capacity.

Who has permission to assign a workspace to a capacity?

Someone with both the capacity contributor role on the capacity and the workspace admin role on the workspace being moved.

How do I monitor capacity usage after it's set up?

Install the Microsoft Fabric capacity metrics app from AppSource. It reports capacity unit consumption by workspace, so you can see what is using the capacity and check usage before and after any change.