Tenant Contributor role is insufficient for creating a Governed Workforce Tenant

Claudia Watson 0 Reputation points
2026-09-16T16:25:37.56+00:00

I am trying to assign a minimal set of permissions needed to allow users to create Governed Workforce tenants.

I am following this document: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/fundamentals/create-new-tenant?tabs=workforce#create-a-new-tenant-for-your-organization

However, the new built-in role "Tenant Contributor" is not sufficient for tenant creation. In the GUI, I get the message, "You do not have sufficient permissions on subscriptions. Please contact your administrator."

I tried creating a custom role with some additional permissions, but they were also insufficient:

                "actions": [
                    "Microsoft.Resources/subscriptions/read",
                    "Microsoft.Resources/subscriptions/resourcegroups/write",
                    "Microsoft.Resources/subscriptions/resourcegroups/read",
                    "Microsoft.Resources/deployments/write",
                    "Microsoft.Resources/deployments/read",
                    "Microsoft.Resources/deployments/*/read",
                    "Microsoft.Resources/deployments/validate/action",
                    "Microsoft.Resources/tags/write",
                    "Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/read",
                    "Microsoft.Authorization/policyAssignments/read",

Assigning "Owner" is sufficient (when Entra-level permissions are configured correctly, of course), but I do not want to grant "Owner" to the users that need the level of access that Tenant Contributor is supposed to grant.

What minimal set of permissions do I need to get this working?

Thank you.

Update: Assigning a custom role with the following actions, which should be the equivalent of assigning the "owner" role, does not work.

                "actions": [
                    "*"
                ]
Microsoft Security | Microsoft Entra | Microsoft Entra ID
0 comments No comments

1 answer

Sort by: Most helpful
  1. Claudia Watson 0 Reputation points
    2026-09-16T23:00:16.3666667+00:00

    I discovered the root issue and a workaround; the front-end validation is incorrect, but can also be entirely ignored. User's image

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments No comments

Your answer

Answers can be marked as 'Accepted' by the question author and 'Recommended' by moderators, which helps users know the answer solved the author's problem.