Azure Pipelines "No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted"

Your organization has no Microsoft-hosted parallel jobs available, so the run cannot be scheduled on hosted agents. New orgs often start with zero until a free-tier grant is approved or a parallel job is purchased.

What this error means

The run queues but never starts on a Microsoft-hosted agent, failing with No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted. It blocks every hosted run in the org until parallelism is available.

##[error]No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted. To request
a free parallelism grant, please fill out the form at
https://aka.ms/azpipelines-parallelism-request

Common causes

New org with no free grant yet

Microsoft now requires new organizations to request the free hosted parallelism grant. Until it is approved, the org has zero hosted parallel jobs and runs cannot start.

No paid parallel jobs configured

If the free grant is exhausted or unavailable, the org needs at least one purchased Microsoft-hosted parallel job in the billing settings.

How to fix it

Request the free parallelism grant

1. Submit the form at https://aka.ms/azpipelines-parallelism-request for your organization.
2. Approval typically takes 2–3 business days; the run can be re-queued once granted.
3. Until then, the job will stay queued - this is a billing/grant gate, not a YAML error.

Use a self-hosted agent or buy parallelism

A self-hosted agent pool runs without hosted parallelism, or purchase a Microsoft-hosted parallel job in Organization settings → Parallel jobs.

pool:
  name: Default        # self-hosted pool - no hosted parallelism needed

How to prevent it

• Request the free parallelism grant when creating a new org.
• Provision a self-hosted pool as a fallback for hosted-parallelism gaps.
• Monitor parallel-job usage so you do not exhaust the grant unexpectedly.

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