Is Azure Artifact Signing Public Trust available to individual developers residing in Puerto Rico?

Hi Manolo & thx for join me at Q&A platform,

good question, especially because you're trying to confirm eligibility before paying for an Azure subscription.

Microsoft's current Artifact Signing documentation says that Public Trust is available to individual developers located in the United States or Canada. Puerto Rico is a US territory, but the documentation doesn't explicitly confirm whether Puerto Rico residents are included in the individual Public Trust onboarding process.

So I wouldn't tell you that you're definitely eligible just because Puerto Rico is a US territory. The geographic eligibility rules and the identity verification system both need to support your location.

There's also an important distinction regarding the billing address. Microsoft lists Puerto Rico separately from the United States in some Azure billing country/region configurations. If Puerto Rico is available as a country/region selection, use your actual location rather than selecting United States simply to get past an eligibility check. If the form instead uses United States with PR as the state/territory, that may be the appropriate address format, but I'd want the Artifact Signing team to confirm which configuration their verification process accepts.

For individual Public Trust validation, the service takes your legal name and address from the Azure billing account. The billing account must be classified as Individual, and its identity information needs to match your verification documents.

Microsoft documents government-issued identification such as passports, driver's licenses, and government ID cards. For supplemental proof of address, recent utility bills and bank statements are among the documented options. However, I couldn't find an official Puerto Rico-specific list confirming which local identification documents are accepted by the verification provider.

Regarding the 30-character address limitation, I checked the Q&A thread you linked. The reported problem is quite specific: the complete Puerto Rico address exceeds the form's limit, but shortening it leads to an address mismatch after identity verification.

Microsoft's Artifact Signing FAQ now documents an Azure CLI method for updating the billing account's sold-to address when its formatting can't be changed in the portal. That doesn't establish a supported workaround for the 30-character validation limit, though. Changing the address to something that no longer matches your documents could simply reproduce the same failure.

I wouldn't recommend abbreviating your address arbitrarily, submitting multiple validation attempts, or creating a paid Artifact Signing resource until this is clarified.

My recommendation is to request confirmation from the Artifact Signing identity validation team on three points: whether individual residents of Puerto Rico are eligible for Public Trust, which billing country/region and state combination should be used, and how addresses exceeding the validation form's character limit are supposed to be handled.

I'd also reference the existing Q&A case about the Puerto Rico address mismatch. It demonstrates that this isn't just a theoretical concern.

The key point is that Puerto Rico's status as a US territory doesn't automatically guarantee compatibility with Microsoft's current individual identity validation workflow. That requires confirmation from the service team, not a guess about how the country dropdown should be completed.

Hopefully a Microsoft moderator can escalate this for an authoritative answer before you incur any charges.

rgds,

Alex

p.s. if my answer is help - pls mark it as an answer