Fortune 500 enterprises overpay on Autodesk by a median 31% relative to a right-sized baseline. Here is the full breakdown — by product family, licensing model, and industry.
The Overpayment Index quantifies the gap between what a Fortune 500 enterprise actually pays Autodesk across an annual contract cycle and what it would pay if its Autodesk entitlement were right-sized to observed usage, deployment, and business demand.
"Overpayment" is defined as the sum of four waste categories: (a) unused subscriptions held for more than six months, (b) Flex token capacity prepaid above the 95th percentile of consumption, (c) entitlements provisioned at a higher tier than the user's job function requires, and (d) premium price points paid relative to benchmarked reference rates for the same product and volume band.
| Licensing model | Median overpayment | 90th pct |
|---|---|---|
| Named-User subscriptions | 33% | 52% |
| Flex token | 28% | 61% |
| Enterprise Business Agreement (EBA) | 26% | 41% |
| Legacy multi-user (grandfathered) | 38% | 58% |
| Industry | Median overpayment |
|---|---|
| Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) | 23% |
| Industrial Manufacturing | 29% |
| Automotive & Aerospace | 31% |
| Energy & Utilities | 34% |
| Media & Entertainment | 39% |
| Public Sector | 27% |
The Index is derived from 120+ enterprise engagements conducted by AutodeskAudits and the prior practices of its co-founders between 2021 and Q1 2026. Each engagement contributes a "right-sized baseline" (the entitlement an independent reviewer would recommend based on observed usage, project pipeline, and contractual flexibility) and an actual committed spend figure.
Overpayment is calculated per engagement as (actual − baseline) ÷ actual. The median, 75th percentile, and 90th percentile figures are the trimmed statistics across the sample. Industry and licensing-model breakdowns use sub-samples of at least 12 engagements. No single client contributes more than 3% of sample weight.
Full methodology is documented at /methodology.
If you want a private read on where your organization sits on the Index — and what the biggest overpayment categories would be if you were audited today — we can conduct a four-week license position review. We publish the benchmark; we do not publish the clients.
AutodeskAudits is not an Autodesk partner, reseller, or affiliate. This Index is produced entirely from our independent client engagements. We accept no data, funding, or review input from Autodesk, Inc.
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