Azure Pipelines: "No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted": the free Microsoft-hosted job now comes from setting up billing, or run on a self-hosted agent
A job that asks for a Microsoft-hosted agent (vmImage) fails with this when the organization has no Microsoft-hosted parallel job. New organizations start without one: the free tier for Microsoft-hosted jobs has to be enabled. The error still sends you to a request form, but Microsoft's page, updated June 22, 2026, gives another way: link the organization to an Azure subscription by setting up billing, and the free grant applies to private projects. Two Stack Overflow questions on this message have been seen more than 220,000 times.
If your pull requests wait on a build validation that cannot get an agent: Azure DevOps Pull Requests, a plugin for JetBrains IDEs, shows each pull request's branch policies with their state, so the required build that has not passed is next to the pull request in your IDE. Get it on JetBrains Marketplace
The whole message
As reported on GitHub in April 2026:
##[error]No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted. To request a free parallelism grant, please fill out the following form https://aka.ms/azpipelines-parallelism-request
On November 5, 2026 that short link still opened a Microsoft form. Answers on Microsoft Q&A from March to June 2026 still point to it and speak of two to five business days.
What the free tier gives
From Configure and pay for parallel jobs:
- Microsoft-hosted: one job at a time, up to 60 minutes each run, 1,800 minutes (30 hours) a month, once the free tier is enabled.
- Self-hosted: one job at a time with no time limit, granted automatically, plus one for each active Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber in the organization.
- Public projects are retired: no new ones can be created, and existing ones keep their free grant until they become private in 2027.
- Paid: US$40 a month for each Microsoft-hosted parallel job, which runs up to 360 minutes a job with no monthly limit, and US$15 for each self-hosted one (Azure DevOps pricing). Buying your first Microsoft-hosted job removes the time limits but still gives one job at a time; to run two at once on the free tier, buy two.
Turning the free Microsoft-hosted job on
- Organization settings → Billing → Set up billing, choose an Azure subscription and save (Set up billing). It is a one-time link per organization; purchases come after it.
- You need to be in Project Collection Administrators (organization owners are), and to have Owner or Contributor on the Azure subscription, which must be in the same Microsoft Entra ID as the organization.
- Then check Organization settings → Pipelines → Parallel jobs. Microsoft says a change there can take up to 30 minutes to become active.
Running without a grant: a self-hosted agent
The free self-hosted job needs no grant and no billing. Register an agent on a machine you have, in the Default pool or one of your own, and point the job at the pool instead of an image:
pool: name: Default
The job then runs on your machine, with its tools and its network, and without the 60-minute limit.
Telling it apart
- The run waits instead of failing, with "This pipeline needs permission to access a resource before this run can continue": a protected resource waiting for Permit.
- The job is queued and waits for a free slot while others run: you have parallel jobs, but they are busy. Buy another, or let the runs finish.
- A job on the free tier stops after 60 minutes: the free Microsoft-hosted job's time limit. Split it into several jobs, or buy a parallel job to raise the limit to 360 minutes.
Azure DevOps pull requests in IntelliJ IDEA and Rider
Azure DevOps Pull Requests, a plugin by Lesstep for JetBrains IDEs 2024.1 or later and Android Studio, reads the organization, project and repository from your git remote and lists the pull requests that wait for your review in an IDE tool window, on Azure DevOps Services and on Azure DevOps Server. It shows the branch policies of a pull request with their state, so a required build that has not passed is next to its pull request, and when a required policy has not passed, its Complete dialog offers auto-complete first. The review inbox is free; voting, commenting, completing and creating are Pro, with a 30-day trial.
Get it on JetBrains Marketplace
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More: no agent in the pool meets the demands · a run that waits for Permit · a required policy has not passed · 日本語