Microsoft Teams Breakout Rooms: How to Use Them for Business

What Are Breakout Rooms in Teams?

Breakout rooms divide meeting attendees into smaller sub-sessions that run at the same time within the same call. Participants collaborate in their own room while the organiser oversees all rooms, broadcasts messages and reopens the main session on demand. They suit any structured meeting with working groups.

Microsoft built the feature for remote workshops, training days and large team meetings where splitting into groups makes sense. For UK businesses that run project kick-offs, training, client onboarding or department breakouts, the feature changes how a meeting flows — from one person presenting to everyone, to every attendee contributing in a smaller setting. If you already run calls through Microsoft Teams calling, breakout rooms extend the same platform into structured collaboration without new software.

This is part of getting more from the licences you already pay for — the same principle behind sound Microsoft 365 security configuration, where the value is in the setup, not the badge.

Which Microsoft 365 Licences Include Breakout Rooms?

Breakout rooms are available to any user on a paid Microsoft 365 plan that includes Teams. The organiser needs a paid licence to create and manage rooms; participants only need to be in the meeting. The free version of Teams is limited, so most businesses standardise on a paid plan.

Microsoft's current UK list prices (ex VAT, annual commitment) are published on Microsoft's official pricing pages:

Business Premium adds the security tooling most SMEs actually need — Microsoft Defender, Intune device management and conditional access — which is why we usually recommend it over Standard for any business handling sensitive data. Breakout rooms require the Teams desktop app or Teams on the web; the mobile app can join a breakout session but cannot create or manage rooms.

How Do You Create Breakout Rooms in a Teams Meeting?

During a live meeting, the organiser clicks the Breakout rooms icon in the meeting toolbar, chooses how many rooms to create, and decides whether to assign people automatically or manually. You can create up to 50 rooms in a single meeting, as documented in Microsoft's official breakout rooms guidance.

The right assignment method depends on how deliberate the grouping needs to be.

Automatic Assignment

Teams distributes participants evenly across the number of rooms you specify. This is the fastest option for large groups where the split does not need to be deliberate — randomised exercises, parallel working sessions, or simply breaking a big audience into manageable chunks.

Manual Assignment

You drag named participants into specific rooms. It takes longer to set up but gives full control, which matters for structured workshops where certain people need to work together, or where you want a facilitator in each group.

Pre-Meeting Configuration

Since 2023, organisers can build breakout rooms before the meeting starts — creating rooms, naming them and pre-assigning participants straight from the meeting invite in the Teams calendar. This is ideal for recurring training or workshops where the groups are known in advance, so no time is lost setting up rooms live.

How Do You Manage Breakout Rooms During a Meeting?

Once rooms are open, the organiser keeps a set of controls to steer the session. You can join any room, broadcast a message to every room at once, set a shared countdown timer, recreate and reshuffle rooms, and close all rooms to return everyone to the main meeting together.

The available tools are:

• Join any room — move between sessions to observe or assist groups
• Broadcast a message — push a text announcement to all rooms without interrupting them
• Set a timer — display a countdown visible to everyone, signalling when to wrap up
• Recreate rooms — shuffle assignments and reopen to mix groups
• Close all rooms — return all participants to the main meeting simultaneously

Participants get a notification when rooms open and can choose to join. If they do not join within a set window, Teams can move them in automatically — a setting worth enabling for large events so nobody is left behind in the lobby.

Are Breakout Room Conversations Recorded?

The main meeting recording does not capture breakout room audio or video. To keep a record of an individual room, a participant with recording permissions must start recording inside that room. Each recording saves to the organiser's OneDrive or the meeting chat. Transcription works per room when enabled for the meeting.

For training sessions where you want a written record of each group's discussion, plan this in advance: enable transcription before the meeting, and brief one person per room to start the recording. Treat those recordings as business data — store them under the same access controls you apply to other Microsoft 365 content, which is something we cover when we set up Microsoft Teams security for clients.

What Are the Best Business Use Cases for Breakout Rooms?

Breakout rooms earn their keep in any meeting where smaller groups outperform one large call. The strongest UK business use cases are structured training, client discovery workshops, interview panels and large all-hands sessions where passive attendance is a problem.

• Training and workshops — deliver content to the full room, split into department or skill groups for exercises, then reconvene to share findings.
• Client workshops — consultancies and agencies run mixed client-and-internal groups to gather requirements across workstreams at the same time.
• Interview panels — separate candidates for individual assessments while interviewers move between rooms, then debrief in the main session.
• Large team meetings — for 50+ attendees, give everyone a chance to contribute in a smaller setting instead of sitting through a one-way broadcast.

Getting consistent results across a distributed team is partly a meeting-design problem and partly a platform problem. If your Teams or business VoIP setup is unreliable, breakout rooms expose it quickly — dropped audio and join failures are far more visible across ten parallel rooms than in one call.

What Are the Limitations of Breakout Rooms?

Breakout rooms have a few hard constraints worth planning around. They do not work in channel meetings, dial-in participants cannot be placed in rooms, and the experience can vary for external guests on some devices. Each meeting supports up to 50 rooms within Teams' overall meeting capacity.

• No channel meetings — breakout rooms work only in scheduled meetings (from the calendar) and Meet Now sessions, not channel meetings.
• No dial-in participants — anyone joining by phone cannot be placed in or moved to a breakout room; everyone in a room must be on the Teams app or web.
• External guests — participants without a Microsoft account can join but may see a slightly reduced experience on some device types.
• Capacity — up to 50 rooms per meeting, within a maximum meeting size of around 1,000 participants, per Microsoft's documented Teams limits.

If you plan a large structured event with a mix of internal and external attendees, test the setup beforehand. The cost of a 30-minute dry run is trivial next to a stalled training day in front of 200 staff. Reliable meetings sit on reliable IT, which is why we bundle Teams configuration into managed IT support rather than treating it as an afterthought.