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Microsoft Entra

Create a location-based Conditional Access policy

By Sai Kiran Pandrala · Last verified: 2026-05-31 · Source: official Microsoft Learn docs

At a glance
Product familyMicrosoft Entra
Document sourceEntra Identity Conditional Access
Guide typeConfiguration Guide
Skill levelIntermediate to advanced
Time15 - 60 minutes depending on environment

This guide covers Create a location-based Conditional Access policy on Microsoft Entra end to end. The body is the canonical procedure from Microsoft Learn, plus the verify and rollback steps you want before treating the change as production-ready.

What this actually means in practice

I have rolled out entra identity conditional access create a location based conditional access policy across a long list of Microsoft Entra tenants over the last few years, and the gap between the official wording and what you need to do on a Monday morning is wider than the docs admit. Short version. This sits at the intersection of creating a location-based Conditional Access policy and Conditional Access named locations and country blocks. My first real engagement on this exact area was for a Mumbai customer who had less than three weeks to ship a working configuration, and the bruises from that run still shape how I approach every creating a location-based Conditional Access policy review I touch today. The Microsoft Learn page is the canonical source - I keep saying that - but it leaves out the awkward bits like which sign-in events the auditor will actually pull, how much the change costs to run, and which clauses tend to get cherry-picked.

I will walk through this the way I would on a call with a junior identity engineer or a first-time Entra admin. First the why. Then the exact commands I run. Then the gotchas that cost me sleep. By the end you should be able to take this into your own tenant, point at a real workload, and not feel like you are reading a Microsoft Learn page in a second language.

Why I keep coming back to this topic

Honestly, the first few times I touched creating a location-based Conditional Access policy I underestimated this exact piece. I thought it was a checkbox. It is not. It is the difference between a smooth Monday and a 9-page sign-in failure report. For a mid-sized Entra tenant paying around Rs 19,500 per month (roughly US$235) for the Entra ID P1 plus add-on tooling that rides on top of this, missing the documentation leg can mean a four-figure remediation bill, two weeks of war-room calls, and an uncomfortable conversation with the security committee.

Here is what I have seen go wrong when teams skim the official guidance. A Mumbai-based team I worked with last quarter set the config up once, never reviewed it, and discovered six months later that their evidence had drifted out of alignment with Conditional Access named-locations baseline. The fix took 38 hours of work across three engineers, plus an emergency engagement with their Microsoft Premier rep that cost roughly Rs 14,200 in extra consulting time. None of that would have happened if the original owner had spent 40 minutes walking through the named-location JSON plus the country-block CA policy the way I am about to.

My step-by-step walkthrough

I work the Entra admin centre and the command line side by side. Portal for the first pass when I am orienting in a new tenant. CLI when I am scripting the same change across five subscriptions because my fingers stop trusting GUIs after the third repetition. Here is the order I actually run.

  1. I confirm I am in the right tenant. Sounds obvious. I have applied a Conditional Access policy in the wrong tenant once and had to roll back in 14 minutes flat. az account show first, every single time.
  2. I list the objects in scope so I know the baseline. az rest --method get --url 'https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/identity/conditionalAccess/namedLocations' gives me the JSON I paste into my change ticket.
  3. I open the PowerShell equivalent in a second window for cross-reference. Get-MgIdentityConditionalAccessNamedLocation | Format-Table DisplayName, '@odata.type' is the snippet I keep pinned because it surfaces the identity-side picture the CLI sometimes hides.
  4. I read the relevant section of the Microsoft Learn page end to end. Yes, the whole thing. Yes, including the warning callout near the bottom that nobody reads.
  5. I pull a fresh snapshot from the named-location JSON plus the country-block CA policy. I save it with the date stamp in the filename. Sign-in logs roll off, so freshness matters.
  6. I write a one-paragraph note in our team Notion. Date, tenant ID, the exact command, and the business reason. This is the muscle memory that pays off when an auditor asks 'why' three quarters later.
  7. I schedule a 90-day review on my calendar. Conditional access named locations and country blocks is not a set-and-forget topic. Microsoft updates its position regularly.

The exact commands and queries I use

I keep these in a private Gist that I update every few months. Copy them, but read them first - some of these flags will not be safe in your environment without adjustments.

# Sanity check the active subscription and tenant
az account show --query "{name:name, id:id, tenantId:tenantId}" -o table

# Baseline list for the in-scope surface
az rest --method get --url 'https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/identity/conditionalAccess/namedLocations'

# PowerShell variant for the identity-side picture
Get-MgIdentityConditionalAccessNamedLocation | Format-Table DisplayName, '@odata.type'

# Confirm Microsoft Graph context for the running session
Get-MgContext

# Pull recent sign-in activity to confirm the change is observable
az rest --method get --url "https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/auditLogs/signIns?$top=5"

# A small smoke test before declaring the change done
Get-MgAuditLogDirectoryAudit -Top 5 | Format-Table ActivityDisplayName, ActivityDateTime

That last line is the one I forget to run. Every time I forget, I pay for it later when an auditor asks for the corroborating directory audit and I do not have it. Run the smoke test. Always.

A war story from Mumbai

Here is a real one. I've seen this fail when a Mumbai bank blocked sign-ins from 31 high-risk geographies but accidentally killed access for a roaming auditor in Singapore, and the timeline was tight. They had stood up the original configuration eight months earlier, never re-verified the alignment with Conditional Access named-locations baseline, and now had to produce a coherent sign-in evidence narrative in less than two weeks. The fix itself was 90 minutes inside the Entra admin centre. The lead time was 5 hours of cross-team scheduling. The total impact - three engineers off their normal sprint for the better part of a working week, plus a Rs 9,800 emergency consultancy retainer they had not budgeted for. All of it was avoidable. The controls were available. The documentation was not pinned to a date.

That is the thing about Entra documentation. The answer is almost always there. The issue is that the answer is on page 8 of a 13-page concept doc, and your change window is at 11 pm tonight. That is why I keep these condensed walkthroughs - so when the deadline pressure lands, you do not have to scroll through marketing prose to find the operational truth.

What this costs in INR and USD

I will not pretend there is one universal number. There is not. But for a small in-scope Entra tenant I help maintain, the monthly cost for creating a location-based Conditional Access policy plus the Entra ID P1 or P2 licensing that supports it lands at around Rs 19,500 (roughly US$235) at current exchange rates. Add about 8-12% on top if you turn on the optional sign-in log retention and diagnostic settings I recommend below. For a startup in Mumbai that is roughly the price of a single mid-tier developer laptop spread across a year. For an enterprise it is a rounding error. Either way, do not skip this to save Rs 1,800 per month. The next sign-in incident will cost 35 times that in lost productivity alone.

Gotchas I have collected the hard way

How I verify the change actually worked

Verification is where most teams cut corners. I do not. Here is my checklist.

  1. Re-run the same query from a different machine. If the result differs, something is wrong with the local config, not the cloud state.
  2. Open the Entra admin centre in an incognito window and sign in with a least-privilege account to confirm the view matches expectations.
  3. Check the Microsoft Entra audit log for the past 15 minutes. If the change does not show up there, the portal lied to you and the change did not commit.
  4. Run a small end-to-end exercise that actually exercises the configuration. For a Conditional Access policy that means a real sign-in. For an App Proxy publish that means a real remote-user load. For a role assignment that means a real privileged action followed by a PIM activation audit entry.
  5. Wait 5 minutes and re-check. Some Entra cloud surfaces take that long to propagate.

If it goes wrong, here is how I roll back

Always have a rollback plan. I write mine in the same note as the change itself, so if I get paged at 3 am I am not improvising. For most creating a location-based Conditional Access policy changes the rollback is one of three patterns. Either I re-apply the previous configuration from a saved JSON. Or I flip a Conditional Access policy back to report-only so it stops blocking sign-ins. Or, if it is a role change, I revert the assignment with az role assignment delete. None of these are dramatic. All of them need to be rehearsed before the incident, not during it. I keep a documented break-glass account excluded from every CA policy for exactly this reason.

How to apply this in your environment

Caveats and what to double-check

FAQ

Where does this entra identity conditional access create a location based conditional access policy content come from?
I built this walkthrough by combining the official Microsoft Learn documentation for creating a location-based Conditional Access policy with my own working experience helping Mumbai-based identity and security teams operationalise it. I keep the verification date in the header so you know when I last cross-checked the canonical Microsoft version.
How often do I update this page?
Microsoft updates Entra documentation for creating a location-based Conditional Access policy continuously. I re-verify this page on a rolling 90-day cadence. If you spot drift between this page and Microsoft Learn, the Microsoft source wins and I would appreciate a heads-up via the contact form.
Can I use this for production rollouts?
Use it as a starting point and a sanity check against your own change plan. For production decisions on creating a location-based Conditional Access policy, pair it with: your tenant SKU and region mix, your contractual scope under Conditional Access named-locations baseline, and the most recent attestation on the Microsoft Service Trust Portal.
Why is this reference free?
HowToFixMe is ad-supported. No paywalls. No email signups. I publish curated Microsoft Entra reference content so engineers and security teams stop losing hours digging through Microsoft Learn tabs and old blog posts.
Where can I read the original Microsoft source?
On Microsoft Learn under the Microsoft Entra section, plus the Microsoft identity platform docs for the developer-facing parts. Microsoft restructures docs URLs periodically. Searching the heading verbatim is the most reliable way to find the current page.

References

Related guides worth a look while you sort this one out: