Does Microsoft 365 (Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams) keep data in Australia?

Office 365 Services: If Customer provisions its tenant in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, Qatar, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, or the United States, Microsoft will store the following Customer Data at rest only within that Geo: (1) Exchange Online mailbox content (e-mail body, calendar entries, and the content of e-mail attachments), (2) SharePoint Online site content and the files stored within that site, (3) files uploaded to OneDrive (work/school), (4) Microsoft Teams chat messages (including private messages, channel messages, meeting messages and images used in chats), and for customers using Microsoft Stream (Classic) (on SharePoint) meeting recordings, and (5) any stored content of interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot or Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to the extent not included in the preceding commitments or subject to Data Residency for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat.

Note: Applies to commercial tenants whose Default Geography is Australia, for the length of the agreement. The Learn page says these commitments are available at no additional cost, and that the Product Terms webpage prevails if the wording differs. Teams was added to the Product Terms on 1 November 2022. Confirm the tenant's Current and Committed Geography in Microsoft 365 admin center > Settings > Org settings > Organization profile > Data location. Education tenants without Advanced Data Residency for Education may store data in the EU or North America instead (same page, Education section). Copilot storage is covered here but Copilot processing is assessed on the separate microsoft-365-copilot tool page.

On occasion, a customer request may be handled by servers in a different region than the location where a Tenant's Customer Data is stored at rest. This may happen where network routing decisions choose a different server for the request processing, but in these cases such Tenant's Customer Data is not moved to a new at rest location.

Note: Product Terms commitments quoted under storage_at_rest are for Customer Data at rest, not a full in-country processing commitment. The same Learn page distinguishes "Data at Rest" from "Data in processing" and says "Detailed documentation for data in processing is coming soon." Remote access by Microsoft personnel from other countries is documented separately (see support_access). Microsoft 365 Copilot LLM processing for Australian tenants is covered on the microsoft-365-copilot page (currently not in Australia; in-country processing planned).

The location of the Customer and Personal Data is distinct from its remote access by personnel in other locations; this data remains within Microsoft datacenter infrastructure in the locations you select when deploying your Online Services (when regional selection is available).

Note: The same page lists Microsoft subsidiary personnel locations and contract-staff locations that include Australia and many other countries (for example India, the Philippines, the United States and Singapore). Customer Lockbox (included with Microsoft 365 / Office 365 E5, or an Information Protection and Compliance / Advanced Compliance add-on) requires the customer's approval before a Microsoft engineer accesses content in Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and Windows 365; it controls approval, not the engineer's country. No Australia-only support option is published.

These commitments are available at no additional cost.

Note: Product Terms at-rest commitments for Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams apply to commercial tenants with a Default Geography of Australia without an extra residency charge. Advanced Data Residency (ADR) is an optional paid add-on that expands coverage beyond those core services and requires 100% of paid licences in the tenant to be covered; Multi-Geo is a separate paid add-on for assigning users to satellite geographies. Education tenants need Advanced Data Residency for Education to keep data in Australia rather than the EU or North America.

These services aren't included in Advanced Data Residency (ADR) or Multi-Geo commitments as Microsoft 365 Core Services or Microsoft 365 Expanded Services.

Note: The FAQ names Microsoft Loop, Clipchamp, and voice/face enrollment as examples. The Microsoft 365 services data locations page also lists Forms, Planner, Whiteboard, Shifts, Stream (Clipchamp), Intune, Entra ID and several Viva services as having separate (often non-ADR) location rules. Product Terms cover only the listed Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams content types; other service data may sit outside Australia even for an Australian tenant. Request processing and remote support access can also leave Australia (see processing and support_access).

The IRAP assessment of Microsoft's services and cloud operations helps provide assurance to public sector customers in government and their partners that Microsoft has appropriate and effective security controls in place for the processing, storage, and transmission of data classified up to and including the level of PROTECTED.

Note: The Office 365 commercial in-scope table on the same page includes Exchange Online, Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Teams, Office Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and others. Microsoft's 26 March 2026 Source Asia post says the latest IRAP assessments of Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 support workloads up to and including PROTECTED, assessed by Neon Cloud. The reports sit behind the Service Trust Portal (aka.ms/au-irap) and were not read, so the exact service list and assessment date in the report itself are not confirmed. IRAP is an assessment, not a certification or agency authorisation.