Teams meeting attendance report: the complete guide

The Teams meeting attendance report is genuinely useful once you know where it lives — but it also has a few rules and blind spots that trip people up. This guide covers downloading it during and after a meeting, what is actually inside, how admins turn it on or off, and where it falls short.

How do I download the Teams attendance report?

Open the meeting's Attendance tab and click Download — that is the short version. There are two moments you can grab attendance, and they behave differently.

During the meeting — in the meeting controls, open People to reveal the Participants pane, click the three-dot More actions menu at the top, and choose Download attendance list. Teams saves a CSV of everyone who has joined so far. You can repeat this as the call goes on, and it gives you a live, running snapshot.

After the meeting — about five minutes after the call ends, open the meeting (or its Chat), select the Attendance tab, and Download. The file is a .csv. For webinars, the path differs: go to Calendar → select the webinar → View event → Manage event → Attendance tab → Download. For recurring meetings, each occurrence has its own report.

What's in the report?

For every attendee, the report records a first-join time, a last-leave time, and a total in-meeting duration, alongside their role and a detailed log of each individual join and leave event. If someone dropped and rejoined, the duration sums all their sessions, so it can be shorter than the gap between first join and last leave.

Microsoft has merged attendance with engagement into a single attendance + engagement report that now spans meetings, webinars, and town halls. Beyond timing, the engagement section counts how many people unmuted, turned on their camera, raised a hand, used each reaction, and participated in Q&A. Identity fields such as a name and email appear where available, though anonymous guests are often blank.

Microsoft does not publish verbatim CSV column headers for standard meetings, so treat the fields above as a description of what you get rather than an exact header list. (Fixed headers like Session Id or Participant Id exist only for the separate live-event engagement report, which is a different feature.)

The in-meeting attendance tab vs. the downloaded report

These two are easy to confuse. The in-meeting attendance tab gives a live, running summary of the call as it's happening — handy for a quick headcount, but incomplete because the meeting isn't over yet.

The downloaded post-meeting report is the complete record. It includes final leave times, accurate total durations, the full join/leave activity log, and the engagement section. If you're keeping attendance for a class, a compliance record, or a billing log, always use the post-meeting report rather than the live snapshot. For a broader walkthrough of finding it, see how to see who attended a Microsoft Teams meeting.

How do admins turn the report on or off?

Admins control the report from a meeting policy in the Teams admin center, and it is on by default. If organizers in your tenant don't see an attendance option at all, it's almost always this policy:

1. Go to Meetings → Meeting policies and open the policy assigned to your users (Global, or a custom policy).
2. In the Meeting scheduling section, find the Attendance and engagement report setting. The options are On, but organizers can turn it off (the default), Off, and On.
3. Use the related Include attendees in the report and Attendee information settings to control whether participant identities are listed.
4. Save the policy and assign it to the relevant users or groups.

In PowerShell the control is unchanged — it is still -AllowEngagementReport on Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy, accepting Enabled, Disabled, or ForceEnabled. Admins can also view participant details within 24 hours through the admin center, but they cannot open a report for a meeting they did not organize. Policy changes can take a few hours to a day to propagate.

What are the limits?

The report is solid for standard meetings, but watch for these gaps:

• Over 120 participants — the during-meeting report shows only some attendees on large calls. The post-meeting report is still complete, so rely on that one for big audiences.
• View-only and lobby users excluded — view-only attendees and anyone left un-admitted in the lobby do not appear in the report.
• Organizer-only access — attendees can't pull the report. Co-organizers can, but only for Teams-scheduled events — not Outlook-created or channel meetings.
• Deleted with the organizer — if the organizer leaves the organization, the report is permanently deleted. Microsoft does not state a fixed numeric retention window for standard meetings, so don't assume one.
• No cross-meeting view — there's no built-in way to roll many meetings into a single attendance summary; that stitching is on you.

Attendance tab vs. report vs. third-party

For most Teams organizers the downloaded report is the right tool — assuming the policy is on. If you need it across many meetings, without depending on an admin, or with automatic late flags, a dedicated tracker fills the gap. We compared the options across platforms in the best ways to track online meeting attendance in 2026.

One last note for anyone who lives in Google Meet rather than Teams: Google's built-in attendance is limited and unavailable on free accounts. Trackr produces a similar automatic attendance report — checking each person off as they join and leave, capturing durations and late arrivals, and exporting to CSV, Google Sheets, or PDF. See the Google Meet attendance tracker guide for the full picture.

Frequently asked questions

These answers carry FAQ structured data. Google retired FAQ rich results in May 2026, so this won't add stars to a search listing — we keep it because AI answer engines still read it to lift clean, sourced answers.