SharePoint storage is one pool shared by every site and every Team in your tenant. Stay over it and Microsoft can put the tenant into read-only mode until usage comes down or more storage is bought.
Microsoft gives each organisation 1 TB of SharePoint storage plus 10 GB for every licence. Forty licences make 1.4 TB; a hundred make 2 TB. Every site draws on that one pool, Teams files included, and a terabyte here is 1,024 GB.
OneDrive is separate and does not count against the pool, so tidying OneDrive frees nothing in SharePoint.
Microsoft's wording is that a tenant which continues to operate above its limit is at risk of read-only mode, in which people may be unable to add or modify content until usage is reduced or more capacity is bought.
If the tenant is already read-only, buying storage is the quickest way back: Confirm purchase lifts read-only mode for up to 14 days while the new capacity is applied, once in any 365 days. If you are close to that point, here is the order to work in.
Microsoft sells extra SharePoint storage by the gigabyte at US$0.20 a month, about US$205 per terabyte a month, paid every month the files stay. What extra storage really costs works through the numbers.
Microsoft 365 Archive keeps whole sites or files inside your tenant at US$0.05 per GB a month for the part above your quota. Nobody can open archived content until it is reactivated. Is Microsoft 365 Archive an archive? covers when that is the right call.
Take the folders nobody is working in out of the tenant altogether, onto storage built for keeping, where people can still find and open them. That is what Shed does, at US$100 per terabyte a month, half Microsoft's rate for extra storage.
The admin center figure lags by 24 to 48 hours, so give a clean-up two days to show.
No. Microsoft's SharePoint storage total does not include the OneDrive created for each licensed user. Clearing out OneDrive frees nothing in the SharePoint pool.
Yes. Deleted files count against the pool while they sit in either stage of a site's recycle bin, which holds them for up to 93 days in all. On a site covered by a retention policy, deleted files are kept in the Preservation Hold library instead and go on counting until the policy expires.
The admin center shows storage used against the total, and Microsoft describes read-only mode as a risk for tenants that continue to operate above their limit. It does not publish a fixed number of days, so treat being over the limit as the warning.
Tell us which libraries or drives are full and roughly how large they are. We size a shed, set up the first sweep with you, and most are running within a week.
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