Should a 40-person company choose Claude Team or Enterprise?

For most 40-person companies, the answer is Team. Both plans charge $20 a seat a month on a yearly contract, so the seat price doesn't settle it. What differs is how usage gets paid for, plus a short list of security and record-keeping features that only Enterprise has. If nobody has asked you for those features, and nobody in your company will read a usage bill every month, start on Team.

The Claude details in this post come from Anthropic's own pages, as of October 2026.

What do the seats cost for 40 people?

Anthropic's pricing page says Team is for 2 to 150 seats, so 40 people fit either plan. It lists these US prices:

• Team standard seat: $20 a month on annual billing, or $25 paid month to month.
• Team premium seat: $100 a month on annual billing, or $125 month to month. It gives five times the usage of a standard seat.
• Enterprise seat: $20 a month with a 20-seat minimum, billed yearly only, plus all usage at API rates (a set price for each chunk of text Claude reads and writes).

Here's the seat arithmetic for 40:

• Team, all standard, annual: 40 x $20 x 12 = $9,600 a year.
• Team, all standard, month to month: 40 x $25 x 12 = $12,000 a year.
• Enterprise: 40 x $20 x 12 = $9,600 a year, before any usage.

Team also lets you mix seat types. As an example, giving four heavy users premium seats and everyone else standard ones comes to 36 x $20 x 12 = $8,640, plus 4 x $100 x 12 = $4,800, for $13,440 a year on annual billing. On Team you know that figure before the year starts, unless you choose to buy extra usage. On Enterprise, usage is added to the $9,600.

At 40 seats, Enterprise means the self-serve version unless you buy extra seats. Anthropic's Enterprise help page says the version sold through its sales team starts at 50 seats.

How is usage paid for on each plan?

Team gives each person an allowance. Anthropic's Team help page says usage limits are "per-member, rather than applied to the team as a whole." A standard seat gets 1.25 times the per-session allowance of Pro, one of Anthropic's paid plans for one person, plus a weekly limit. When one person runs out, nobody else is affected. That person waits for the limit to reset, or carries on with usage credits. An Owner, one of the account's admins, has to switch those credits on and pay for them in advance, and they're billed at API rates.

Enterprise has no allowance. Its help page says, "The seat fee only covers access to the platform and doesn't include any usage." Every chat is metered from the first word, and so is every session in Claude Code (which writes software) and Cowork (which works through multi-step tasks for you). Anthropic's consumption guide says those two use far more than ordinary chat. Nothing caps a person's spending unless an admin sets a limit. In the guide's words: "No limit anywhere = no limit."

Hitting a limit plays out differently on each plan. On Team, someone whose credits hit a spend limit waits for their included allowance to reset, as they would without credits. On Enterprise there's nothing to drop back to, so a person who hits their limit stops until an admin raises it or the month ends. If the limit is set for the whole company, Anthropic's page on moving from Team to Enterprise says "all users lose access immediately until the spend limit is raised or the new month begins." Its consumption guide recommends limits for each group and each person instead.

Both plans can use Fable, Anthropic's top model, since it's on every paid plan. How it's paid for differs. On a Team standard seat, Fable runs on usage credits from the first message. On a Team premium seat, it's included for up to half the weekly limit. On Enterprise, it's billed at API rates like everything else.

What does Enterprise add?

The pricing page marks these as Enterprise only:

• SCIM, which creates and removes Claude accounts from your staff directory, such as Okta or Microsoft Entra ID, so nobody does it by hand.
• Audit logs, a record of who did what and when.
• The Compliance API, which lets your own systems pull chat histories and activity logs.
• Custom data retention, so you decide how long chats are kept.
• A HIPAA-ready setup, for companies that handle US patient health data.

Enterprise can also give skills to one group only, such as sales. A skill is a written set of instructions Claude follows for one job. On Team, a skill an Owner adds goes to everyone in the company.

Most of these become needs when someone outside asks for them. A customer's security questionnaire wants audit logs, or an auditor asks how long you keep chats. SCIM starts to matter once your IT team runs one staff directory for every system. If none of that applies to you today, we'd start on Team. At 40 people, one set of skills for everyone usually works, and adding or removing people by hand is a small job.

Is paying only for what you use cheaper?

Not against standard seats. Enterprise can't come in under a Team plan of standard seats on annual billing with no extra usage, because it's the same $20 seat with usage added on top. Against a plan with premium seats, like the example above, it depends on how much your people use. A finance lead could still fairly prefer it, since you pay only for what people use, your heaviest users have no cap, and the controls listed above come with it.

Anthropic's pricing page, Enterprise help page and consumption guide give no typical usage cost per person, and we won't guess one. It depends on what each person does with Claude.

Metered billing also creates a job. Anthropic's Enterprise consumption guide tells admins to review spending by group every week during rollout and every month after that, and to check each month how often people are reaching their limits. At a 40-person company that falls to an owner, a finance lead or whoever looks after IT. On Team, the per-person limits do most of that work, and the bill only changes when you add seats or buy usage credits. If nobody will take the job, that's a reason to stay on Team.

Check what changes before you move

If you start on Team and later need Enterprise, Anthropic's migration page says this:

• The self-serve move "is not reversible."
• Chats, projects, members and their roles carry over.
• These start switched off on Enterprise: skills, the setting that lets Claude run code and create files, Claude Design with its slides and docs tools, and Claude in Chrome (Claude working inside your web browser). Skills you already made come back when an admin turns skills on.
• Unused Team usage credits roll over. New monthly credits for the Claude API, which Team includes for developers building their own tools, stop.
• Anthropic suggests raising any spend limit you set on Team before the switch, so people aren't locked out.

If your staff are still on their own personal Claude accounts, moving them onto Team comes first. Choosing the plan is one step in setting Claude up for your company. If you do go to Enterprise, Amit's map of the Enterprise admin console walks through what an Owner looks after there. His test of what one line of company-wide instructions costs explains why extra words use up allowance on a Team seat and add to the bill on Enterprise.

If you'd like help choosing and setting up your plan, talk to us.