How many tasks can a Planner Premium plan hold?
Three thousand per plan. Planner Basic allows 9,000, so on this one dimension the premium tier has the lower ceiling.
That is the part most people do not expect, and it is the first thing a large Project Online schedule runs into, before any question of a missing module.
First, what Planner Premium does do
Planner Premium is a real scheduling tool, and the ceiling is a question of scale rather than of capability. It absorbed Project for the Web in August 2025, and it carries most of what you would expect from a scheduling product:
- All four dependency types, finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish and start-to-finish, with lead and lag
- A critical path, behind a filter in the timeline view
- Baselines, sprints, goals and task history
- Portfolios, with a roadmap view across premium plans
If you have read elsewhere that Planner Premium lacks dependencies, a critical path or baselines, that is out of date. It has all three. The gaps are real but they are somewhere else, and the task ceiling is the one you meet first.
The ceiling, and the surprise
| Plan type | Tasks per plan |
|---|---|
| Planner Basic | 9,000 |
| Planner Premium | 3,000 |
The tiers are not a superset of one another. Premium adds scheduling, dependencies, baselines and portfolios, and carries a smaller task ceiling while doing it. If your mental model is that paying more raises every limit, this is the one that breaks it.
Both figures are from Microsoft's published Planner service limits, checked 23 August 2026. Microsoft ships Planner monthly, so check the current figure before you plan around it.
What that means for a Project Online migration
A single departmental project rarely approaches 3,000 tasks. A programme schedule does. Anything with phases, sub-phases and line-item deliverables accumulates rows quickly, and construction, engineering and infrastructure schedules routinely run to five figures. The schedules most likely to cross the line are the ones you care most about moving intact.
Tasks beyond the cap do not come across. That leaves three options, and each has a cost worth naming before you pick one: trim the schedule to fit, split it across several plans and accept that dependencies crossing the new boundary go with it, or move that schedule somewhere without the ceiling.
Count before you decide. This is the one claim in the whole comparison you can check against your own file in about two minutes, and the answer is specific to your schedules rather than to anyone's general argument. If none of your plans is near 3,000 rows, this page does not apply to you and you should stop reading it.
How Onplana handles it
There is no per-project task cap. Imported Microsoft Project schedules commit in paginated batches rather than in a single pass, which is why a large plan imports rather than truncates, and dependencies, baselines and custom fields come across with it.
You do not have to take that on trust. The free Migration Preview reads a .mpp or MSPDI XML file and reports what is in it, including the task count, without an account and without uploading anything into a workspace.
Common questions
How many tasks can a Microsoft Planner Premium plan hold?
Three thousand per plan. Microsoft documents the limit in the Planner service limits on Microsoft Learn, checked 23 August 2026. It is a per-plan ceiling rather than a per-tenant one, so the practical question is whether any single schedule you run today crosses it.
Does Planner Basic really hold more tasks than Premium?
Yes. Basic allows 9,000 tasks per plan and Premium allows 3,000, so on this one dimension the premium tier has the lower ceiling. The tiers are not a simple superset of one another: Premium adds scheduling capability, dependencies, baselines and portfolios, and carries a smaller task ceiling while doing it.
What happens to the tasks above the limit when I migrate?
Tasks beyond the cap do not come across. We are deliberately not going further than that, because how the boundary is reported is not something Microsoft documents, and guessing at it would be the kind of claim you should not take on trust from a competitor either.
Is 3,000 tasks actually a problem for a PMO?
It depends entirely on how your schedules are shaped, which is why counting beats speculating. A single departmental project rarely approaches it. A programme schedule imported from Project Online, with phases, sub-phases and line-item deliverables, frequently runs past it, and construction and engineering schedules routinely run to five figures.
Can I split a large schedule across several plans?
You can, and for some programmes that is a reasonable structure anyway. What it costs you is the dependencies that crossed the boundary you just introduced, plus a rollup you now maintain by hand. It is a real option, not a free one, and it is worth pricing before you commit to it.
Does Onplana have a task limit per project?
No. There is no per-project task cap, and imported Microsoft Project schedules commit in paginated batches rather than in one pass, which is why a large plan imports rather than truncates. The free Migration Preview reads a .mpp or XML file and reports the counts without an account, so you can check your own file rather than take our word for the risk.