Add guests to a team in Microsoft Teams

Sometimes you'll want to collaborate with people who aren't in your team’s organization. If you want to collaborate with them in Teams, you can add them as a guest. Guests have fewer capabilities than team members or team owners, but there's still a lot they can do.

You must be a team owner to add a guest in Teams. Before guests can join a team, an admin must enable guest access in Teams. If you can't add a guest, check with your admin.

Add a guest to your team

Guests must have a Microsoft 365 work or school account. If the guest doesn’t yet have a Microsoft account associated with their email address, they will be directed to create one for free.

After you add a guest to a team, it may take a few hours before they have access. Guests outside your org will get an email with an invitation to join the team, and can only access the team after accepting the invitation.

To add a guest to your team in Teams:

Select Teams and go to the team in your team list.
Select More options > Add member.

Enter the guest's email address. Anyone with a business or consumer email account, such as Outlook, Gmail, or others, can join your team as a guest.

If you receive a "We didn't find any matches" error while trying to add a guest, please submit a service request to allow guests.

Add your guest's email address/ name. Select Edit guest information and type a friendly name for them. Be sure to take the time to do this now—you’ll need the help of an IT admin to do it later.

Select Add. Guests will receive a welcome email invitation that includes some information about joining Teams.

Identify guests on a team

You can tell if someone is a guest by looking anywhere their name appears—the word “Guest” appears after it. You can also see everyone’s roles in the Members tab of a team. Go to the team name, and select More options > Manage team > Members.