About daily budgets

No. You'll need to use a lifetime budget instead.

Daily budgets can be useful if it's important for you to spend roughly the same amount each day to get consistent daily results. (For example, if you want to aim for a consistent number of daily impressions for your ads.) Lifetime budgets have a less constrained spending rhythm and can be useful if you don't want to exceed a certain amount of overall spend. Lifetime budgets work best if you have more flexibility on how much you spend each day.

There are several possible explanations for this:

• You may be using accelerated delivery. Accelerated delivery is designed to spend your budget as quickly as possible. It can spend it in less than an hour. If you don't want it to be spent that fast, switch to standard delivery. Learn more about pacing.
• Your ad set may have been in the learning phase. In the learning phase, Meta may deliver your ads more aggressively to learn who is most likely to get you the result that you optimised for. This helps us stabilise your costs and delivery as quickly as possible, but can lead to higher initial costs that cause us to spend your budget faster. A learning phase is likely to occur when your ad set starts running and whenever you make changes to it (for example, bid and budget adjustments). Learn more about significant edits and learning phase.
• Your budget may be close to or lower than your bid. A small budget can be spent quickly if your manual bid is relatively high or if your ad set uses automatic bidding. Bear this in mind when setting your daily budget. It should be higher than your bid, and ideally as large as possible.

If you're using a daily budget and your ad set is running indefinitely, we approach spending your budget in the way outlined above every week.

If you're using a daily budget and your ad set has an end date, we'll prorate how much we aim to spend on the week of the end date. For example, if your ad set had a £10 budget and an end date that falls on a Wednesday, on the week of the end date we wouldn't spend more than £40 that week (£10 multiplied by four days), rather than £70.

If you're using a daily budget and you start running your ad set in the middle of the week, we'll prorate the total calendar week spend accordingly. For example, if you start running your ad at midnight on a Wednesday and your daily budget is £10, we won't spend more than £40 for the remainder of the calendar week (£10 multiplied by the four days left).

If you change your budget in the middle of the week, we calculate a new amount to spend for the rest of that week, based on the new budget and the amount of time remaining for that week. For example, if you run an ad set from Sunday to Tuesday with a daily budget of £10, then switch it to £20 at midnight on Wednesday, we'll switch from aiming to spend £70 over seven days, to £80 over four days (the amount of days left in a calendar week when you changed your budget). Note that the actual amount spent from Sunday to Tuesday does not affect what we'll aim to spend Wednesday to Saturday. Though the two time periods fall within one calendar week, they're independent of each other when it comes to spending your budget because of the change.

If you're using a daily budget and you start running your ad set in the middle of the day, we'll prorate your budget and aim to spend it during the rest of that day. For example, if you set a daily budget of £200 and started running your ad set at noon, we'd aim to spend £100 for the rest of that day. This is because the day is half over (there are 12 hours left out of 24), so we'd divide £200 by 2.

Note that this prorated spend is what we aim for, but isn't guaranteed. The only guarantee is that we won't spend more than 125% of the highest daily budget in place for your ad set that day. For the rest of the week, we won't spend more than your budget multiplied by the number of days remaining in the week, regardless of how much gets spent on the day of the change. For example, if you set a daily budget of £50 at noon on a Wednesday, we won't spend more than £175 between noon on Wednesday and Saturday (£50 multiplied by 3.5 days).

If you change your budget in the middle of the day, we aim to spend a prorated amount for the rest of the day. For example, if you increased your budget from £100 to £200 at noon, we'd aim to spend £100 for the rest of that day. This is because the day is half over, so we divide the £200 by two. If, however, you decreased your budget from £100 to £50 at noon, we'd aim to spend £25 for the rest of that day. This is because the day is half over, so we divide £50 by 2.

Note that this prorated spend is what we aim for, but isn't guaranteed. The only guarantee on the day of the change is that we won't spend more than 125% of the highest daily budget in place for your ad set that day. For the rest of the week after the change, we won't spend more than your new budget multiplied by the number of days remaining in the week, regardless of how much gets spent on the day of the change. For example, if you change your budget from £100 to £50 at noon on a Wednesday, we won't spend more than £175 between noon on Wednesday and Saturday (£50 multiplied by 3.5 days).

Changing your ad set's end date doesn't change how we approach spending your budget. After an end date change, just like in any other scenario, we check how much we've spent in the current calendar week. If we aren't on track to spend your full budget (meaning what your budget is set at multiplied by the number of days remaining in the calendar week) by the end of the calendar week, we try to spend more than your daily budget (but again, not more than 125% of it) each day until we are back on track. If we are on track, we'll continue trying to spend as we did on previous days.

An amount spent before you change your budget settings (such as pausing a campaign, changing the budget amount or changing the delivery schedule) is billable if it's within 125% of what you had set for your daily budget, even if it's not within 125% after the change. In other words, 125% of the highest daily budget in place that day is billable.

Learn more about budgets, spending limits and your billing threshold.