Unable to accept family subscription share

Hi, Karin Suchy

The message indicates a mismatch between the family-group record and the subscription-sharing record. An unexpired Microsoft 365 Personal subscription should not prevent you from joining the owner’s family group, so waiting until October 26 may not resolve this specific loop.

Here are some suggestions you can try:

Open the Microsoft Family page directly in a private browser window, sign in with the invited Microsoft account, and check whether a pending invitation appears there. Accept it from that page instead of using the email button.

If you already appear as a member of the owner’s family group, have the owner open the subscription-sharing page. Start sharing only appears beside family members who have joined but do not yet have subscription benefits.

Confirm that the owner is signed in with the exact Microsoft account that purchased the Family subscription, not another account shown in the browser.

If you are listed as a family member but Start sharing is still missing, this points to a stuck account-side sharing record. Contact Microsoft Support, select Microsoft 365 > Manage subscription, and ask them to check the Family membership and subscription-sharing records. Reinstalling Office or changing Brave settings will not correct that account-side state.

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Thank you for your patience in reading, I hope this information has been helpful to you. 

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Only partially helpful.

I will need to monitor this until 26 Oct 2026.
As a worse case scenario, if I am unable to gain access to the Subscription Owner's family account, I will need to reinstate my original personal account (which would be a most undesirable outcome).

Thx.

It has only answered one part of my question.

The second part of my question was around the error message :

"Looks like this invitation link is not working.

1 more step to go: Please ask organizer to go to Subscriptions tab on account.microsoft.com and click on Start Sharing for you."

It seems to me the system is looping.

Firstly, the Subscription Owner did initially share the subscription to my email (via 'Share Subscription / Share / Email invite').

Then, I clicked join.

Then the error message appeared, asking the Subscription Owner to click 'Start Sharing'. If this is the same as 'Share Subscription / Share / Email invite', then the system is looping.