PBIRS Sep 2026 Bug? Publisher Role Users Cannot View Reports

Hi everyone,

I recently upgraded our Power BI Report Server from the May 2026 release to the September 2026 release, and I encountered a critical change regarding user roles and permissions.

The Issue:

Prior to this update, users who only had the "Publisher" role on a dashboard or folder could successfully view the reports. However, immediately after upgrading to the Sep 2026 version, these users can no longer view their reports and are getting the following error message when trying to access them:

"User permissions error: You do not have permission for this operation. Contact your administrator to obtain the necessary permissions."

The Workaround:

We found that explicitly adding the "Browser" role alongside the "Publisher" role resolves the issue. Since doing this manually for hundreds of dashboards and users was not feasible, I wrote a custom PowerShell script using the native PBIRS REST API to recursively scan the server and automatically grant the "Browser" role to any user who only had the "Publisher" role.

My Questions for the Community:

- Has anyone else experienced this exact issue after upgrading to the September 2026 release?

- Is this an intentional security architecture change by Microsoft in this release, or is it a bug?

Thanks in advance for your insights.