Microsoft's Bridge to Cloud 3 promotion, or BTC3, gives Dynamics NAV customers a 30 percent discount on Dynamics 365 Business Central Online licenses for enrollments made through December 2027. It is the third version of a licensing incentive Microsoft has run since 2021 to move companies off perpetual, on-premises Dynamics licenses, and for NAV customers weighing a migration in 2026, it is the clearest financial reason yet to stop deferring that decision.
The promotion’s terms are simple. What decides whether BTC3 makes sense for a given company sits in the terms that don't make the headline: a minimum license-value requirement, a non-cancellable three-year commitment, and eligibility rules that disqualify some organizations before they get started. This guide covers what BTC3 includes, where those terms matter more than the 30 percent figure, and what a NAV migration still requires once the licensing question is settled.
Want answers to the most frequently asked questions? Review our FAQ section below before continuing on to the rest of the blog:
The 30 percent discount is fixed for a three-year term once a company enrolls, and the term is non-cancellable. The enrollment window itself runs from January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2027, so the three-year clock starts whenever enrollment happens within that window, not from a fixed calendar date.
Yes. Dual-use rights let an enrolled company run Business Central Online alongside its existing NAV environment, with Enhancement Plan benefits intact on the on-premises side, for the length of the promotional term. That makes a phased rollout possible instead of a single hard cutover.
No. BTC3 is a licensing promotion, not a project plan. It discounts the Business Central Online license itself; the work of inventorying customizations, migrating data, and rebuilding integrations still has to happen separately, and Microsoft's own migration documentation does not account for a specific company's customization footprint.
Microsoft allows a 30-day grace period for an Enhancement Plan that lapsed briefly. Beyond 30 days, the lapsed period has to be paid back before enrollment is possible.
Generally, no. Organizations that already enrolled under Bridge to Cloud 1 or 2 are excluded from BTC3, which can catch multi-entity companies off guard when only one subsidiary used an earlier round.
The lifecycle clock keeps running regardless. NAV 2018 exits extended support on January 11, 2028, a year after BTC3 closes, and NAV 2016 already passed its own deadline in April 2026. Missing BTC3 does not pause either date.
The promotion runs from January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2027, and applies to organizations still running Dynamics NAV, GP, AX, or SL under a perpetual license purchased before September 1, 2024, with an active Enhancement Plan at the time of enrollment.
The mechanics are direct once laid out: the discount is fixed for a three-year term, and the term is non-cancellable. That single detail changes the nature of the commitment, so it is worth restating plainly: this is not a trial a company can abandon if year one gets messy. It is a three-year commitment to cloud licensing, made in exchange for price certainty during the part of a migration that is hardest to budget for.
The 30 percent figure draws most of the attention, but the structural terms underneath it decide whether BTC3 makes sense for a given company. Annualized cloud license spend has to equal or exceed the current Enhancement Plan renewal cost, and that threshold has to hold for all three years, not just at signup. Picture an operations director staring at an Enhancement Plan invoice that has been roughly the same size since 2019, covering a license count nobody has revisited since the last on-premises renewal. BTC3 forces that number to get looked at again, for the first time in years for a lot of NAV shops.
Honestly, the discount is the least interesting number in the whole program. What decides the outcome is whether the license count underneath it reflects how the business runs today, not how it ran when the last renewal happened to get signed.
Once enrolled, a company can run Business Central Online alongside its existing NAV environment, with Enhancement Plan benefits intact on the on-premises side, for the length of the promotional term. That matters more than it sounds like it should. Finance can close a month in NAV while operations pilots the same process in Business Central, without betting the close on a system nobody has stress-tested yet.
This is where BTC3 earns its keep operationally, not just financially. A hard cutover asks every department to trust a new system on day one. Dual-use rights let that trust build in pieces instead: warehouse first, then finance, then whichever integration was always going to be the hardest part anyway. For a distributor running thousands of SKUs through EDI connections to retail partners, that staged approach is often the difference between a migration and a crisis.
None of this touches the technical side of a NAV migration, and it shouldn't. BTC3 is a licensing promotion, not a project plan. Customizations still have to be inventoried and sorted into what gets rebuilt as an AL extension, what gets replaced by a standard Business Central feature, and what simply gets dropped because the business has outgrown it.
Our recent breakdown of where 2026 NAV migrations get hard covers exactly this ground, particularly the C/AL code that has no direct path into Business Central. Microsoft's own migration documentation goes deeper on the technical prerequisites, though it will not say anything about a specific customization footprint. Answering that takes an assessment, not a subscription tier.
Eligibility sounds simple until a company gets three questions into it. The perpetual license has to predate September 1, 2024. The Enhancement Plan has to be active at enrollment, though Microsoft allows a 30-day grace period for plans that lapsed briefly; anything longer means paying back the lapsed period before enrolling. Organizations that already used Bridge to Cloud 1 or 2 are generally excluded from BTC3, a detail that catches some multi-entity companies off guard when only one subsidiary migrated under an earlier round. Enrollment itself runs through a Cloud Solution Provider rather than directly with Microsoft, which is where a partner's role in the process begins.
Dynamics NAV 2018, the last version Microsoft shipped, exits extended support on January 11, 2028, a year after BTC3's enrollment window closes. NAV 2016 already crossed that line in April 2026. Waiting out the promotion does not buy extra room against the lifecycle clock either. The two deadlines run on separate tracks, and for a company on an older version, the lifecycle clock is the one that arrives first, regardless of what gets decided about the promotion.
None of this makes BTC3 the wrong reason to finally move. A predictable, discounted three-year runway is a legitimate reason to stop deferring a decision that keeps getting more expensive to put off. It works best as the financial half of a decision that also has a technical half, weighed together instead of one after the other.
For NAV customers weighing the terms against their own environment, our step-by-step migration guide and FAQ page cover what licensing paperwork does not: what happens to data, customizations, and timeline once enrollment is signed.
Western Computer has walked more than 300 NAV customers through exactly this decision, weighing BTC3's terms against the technical reality of their environment before a contract gets signed on either side. A 15-minute readiness call is zero-commitment, and it is the fastest way to find out where a specific license count and customization footprint land against both deadlines.