How budgets, spending limits and your payment threshold differ

There are several ways for you to manage how much you spend when you run ads on Facebook, Instagram and other Meta technologies. Your budgets, spending limits and payment threshold all help you control how much you end up spending for your ads.

A budget is the amount of money that you want to spend on showing people your ads, over the time you've set them to run. You can set an overall budget for your campaign with Meta Advantage campaign budget (previously known as campaign budget optimisation) or set individual budgets for your ad sets.

There are two types of budget durations:

• Daily budgets: The average amount you want to spend on an ad set or campaign each day. Daily budgets are not a hard cap.
• Lifetime budgets: The total amount you're willing to spend over the entire runtime of your campaign or ad set. Lifetime budgets are a hard cap, not an average.

Note: Lifetime budgets take the place of campaign spending limits when campaign budget optimisation is enabled.

Spending limits can also ensure that you spend no more on ads than you want to:

• Campaign spending limits: A maximum amount you're willing to spend on a given advertising campaign. A campaign spending limit doesn't affect your ad's delivery, but it ensures that all of the ad sets and ads in your campaign stop running once your campaign reaches its limit.
• Account spending limits: A lifetime limit on the amount your ad account can spend across all the campaigns you're running. Your account spending limit should reflect your overall advertising budget to achieve the best results.
• Daily spending limits: A daily spend limit helps foster a safe and trustworthy environment on our technologies. Under this initiative, ad accounts will be allocated a maximum amount of spending per day. Ad accounts that meet our spend criteria will be reviewed for adherence to our Self-Serve Ad Terms, Advertising Standards and other standards before they're approved for a higher or lower spend limit.

A payment threshold is an amount that controls when you'll receive a bill for your ads based on how much you spend. If you reach your payment threshold in a given month, you'll receive a bill. If you run ads after you've reached your payment threshold, you'll receive a second bill on your billing date. Learn more about when you'll pay for Facebook ads.

As you run ads, you'll accrue ad costs and we'll automatically charge you if the amount that you spend reaches your payment threshold. An initial payment threshold will be allocated to all advertisers, but we keep this under review, and the threshold can be increased or decreased, based on an ad account's payment history and adherence to our Self-Serve Ad Terms, Advertising Standards and other standards.

We also use data about you and your ad account to:

• Determine if you're eligible for a grace period, and the length of this grace period, so that you can still show ads for a short time after you reach your threshold.
• Determine if your business is eligible for net 30 billing. Learn more about how to add net 30 billing as a payment method on your account.

Note: Meta uses data about you and your ad account for the purposes described in this article, to ensure adherence to our Self-Serve Ad Terms, Advertising Standards and other standards and because it is in our legitimate interests to offer billing and spending options to maximise value for advertisers. You can learn more about the data we collect by clicking here, and check the status of your account by visiting Business Support Home. If you disagree with your billing and/or spending options, please fill in this form in our support centre to request a review from our team. If your request does not relate to the questions in the form, please select I have a question about a payment, then select None of the above and provide a description of your problem in the description box provided.