How to Change Facebook Ad Billing Threshold
Trying to change your Facebook Ads billing threshold can feel like a confusing game of cat and mouse. You know you need to increase your ad spend to scale your campaigns, but Facebook seems determined to charge your card multiple times a day for small amounts. This article will walk you through exactly what the billing threshold is, how it actually works, and the steps you can take to influence it so you can spend more efficiently.
What is the Facebook Ad Billing Threshold?
Before diving into how to change it, it's important to understand what the billing threshold actually is. Think of it like a tab at your favorite coffee shop. When you first start going, they might ask you to pay for each coffee individually. After you’ve become a regular and they trust you, they might let you run a tab up to $50 before asking you to settle up. The Facebook billing threshold works in much the same way.
It’s a specific amount of ad spend that, once reached, triggers a charge to your primary payment method. In addition to this threshold, Facebook will also try to charge you every month on your official billing date, regardless of whether you’ve hit your threshold or not.
For new ad accounts, this threshold is notoriously low - often starting at just $10 or $25. This is Facebook's way of minimizing its risk. They want to make sure you're a legitimate advertiser who pays your bills on time before they let you run up a large balance.
Threshold vs. Payment Date
It's a common point of confusion, so let's be clear: the billing threshold and the billing date are two different things.
Your Billing Threshold is a cost-based trigger. You get charged whenever you hit this spending amount (e.g., every time you spend $100).
Your Billing Date is a time-based trigger. You get charged on this day of the month for any outstanding balance, even if you haven't hit your threshold.
You are charged whenever one of these events happens first. If your daily spend is high, you'll likely hit your threshold multiple times before your billing date arrives. If your spend is low, you may only be charged on your billing date.
Why Increase Your Facebook Ad Billing Threshold?
Having a low billing threshold might not seem like a big deal at first, but it quickly becomes a pain point as you start to scale your ad spend. Here are a few key reasons why increasing it is beneficial:
For Scaling Campaigns: If you're spending $500 a day but have a $50 billing threshold, your credit card will be charged ten times a day. This barrage of transactions can trigger fraud alerts with your bank, leading to declined payments and an immediate pause on all your campaigns. A higher threshold prevents this.
Simplified Accounting: Fewer, larger transactions are much easier to reconcile in your accounting software than dozens of tiny charges. Your bookkeeper or accountant will thank you.
Improved Cash Flow Management: For some businesses, aligning fewer, larger payments with their revenue cycle can make cash flow easier to manage.
Prevent Payment Issues: When a bank sees a lot of small recurring charges, even from an authorized brand like Meta, they may think it could be fraud. Avoiding these issues gives you more peace of mind.
The Hard Truth: You Cannot Manually Change Your Billing Threshold
Here’s the most important thing to know, and the one that trips most people up: you cannot manually set a new billing threshold. There is no box to type in, no dropdown menu to select from. It’s an automated system based on trust and payment history.
Facebook automatically increases your threshold as you consistently hit your current limit and pay it off successfully. If you have a $50 threshold, once you successfully pay that balance a few times, Facebook's system will likely bump you up to $75 or $100. This process continues over time as you build a positive history.
So, the question isn’t actually "How do I change it?" but rather, "How can I speed up the process of Facebook increasing it for me?"
How to Get Your Billing Threshold Increased
While you can't just pick a new number, you can take specific actions to show Facebook you're a trustworthy advertiser. Here are the steps to follow to help influence an increase faster.
Step 1: Find Your Current Billing Threshold
First, you need to know where you stand. You can see your current threshold by navigating to the Billing section of your Ads Manager.
Go to your Meta Ads Manager.
Click the hamburger menu (☰ All Tools) on the left-hand side.
Under "Manage business," select Billing.
In the top right, go to Payment Settings. Your next billing date and your current total ad costs will be shown near the top. Some accounts may show the "Amount till bill" threshold while others may just display your billing threshold as "Payment Settings".
This page will show you your current balance and how close you are to reaching your threshold. Keep this number in mind for the next step.
Step 2: Make a Manual Payment
This is the most effective lever you can pull. Making a manual payment before you reach your threshold shows Facebook that you are proactive about paying your bill. Even better, it settles your balance to zero, which helps accelerate the process towards your next threshold payment.
Here's how to do it:
Follow the steps above to get to the Payment Settings section in Billing.
You'll see your "Current Balance" and a button that says Pay Now.
Click Pay Now. You can choose to pay the full outstanding balance or a different amount. Choose the method and confirm the payment.
By repeatedly hitting your threshold and/or paying it off early with manual payments, you are signaling to Meta’s system that you’re a reliable customer. Do this consistently for a couple of weeks, and you will almost certainly see your threshold get raised automatically.
Step 3: Ensure Your Payment Method is Rock-Solid
A failed payment is the fastest way to get your ads paused and ruin your "trust score" with Facebook. To avoid this, make sure:
Your primary payment method is a credit card (often preferred by Meta over debit cards or PayPal for higher spending).
Your credit card has a high enough limit to cover your daily ad spend, even with multiple charges.
The card information is up-to-date and not close to expiring.
You have added a backup payment method in case the primary one fails for any reason.
The Billing Threshold vs. The Account Spending Limit
While you can't directly control the billing threshold, there is a related setting you can control: the Account Spending Limit.
The account spending limit is a hard cap you can set on the total lifetime spend for your entire ad account. It's not a billing setting, but an overall safety net. Once you hit this limit, all of your ads will stop until you manually increase or remove the limit.
This is useful for:
Budget control for agencies: An agency can set the account spending limit to match a client's total monthly budget to ensure they never overspend.
Preventing accidental overspending: If you're running a short-term campaign, you can set the limit to your total budget so there's no way for it to run over.
You can set, change or remove your spending cap in the same Billing settings tab by heading to "Spending limit". Just be careful: many advertisers set this once and forget about it. Six months later, their top-performing campaign suddenly stops working because they hit a long-forgotten account spending limit. Use it wisely, and remember it's there.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. My ads keep stopping because I hit my low threshold several times a day. What's the quickest fix?
The quickest fix in this scenario is manual payments. Pay off your balance a few times a day before it hits the threshold. This is a bit of a manual chore, but doing it proactively for a few days can often trigger a programmatic increase from Facebook's system much faster than just letting the payments process a dozen times.
2. Will contacting Facebook Support get my threshold increased?
In nearly all cases, no. Front-line support staff generally don't have the ability to manually override an automated billing threshold based on a user request. The system is designed to be self-regulating based on payment history, not on conversation. The fastest way to "convince the system" is a proven track record, not a chat with support. So, your best bet will still be being consistent and patient.
3. Will my ad account get paused after the first missed payment?
Not necessarily after one. But Meta, as well as Google Ads or any other ad platform, will likely put your campaigns on cooldown the second your outstanding payments go overdue. Facebook is actually a bit more lenient - they'll attempt to charge the card a couple of days and even try different attached payment methods on the account. But after all that is attempted, it will get paused, and paused accounts that miss payments can sometimes be taken down for good.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, you can't just tell Meta you want a higher billing threshold, you have to earn it. By ensuring you always have a valid payment method, paying your bill consistently and on time, and using manual payments to proactively clear your balance, you're sending all the right signals. Be patient, manage your payments well, and the system will reward you with a higher threshold that makes scaling your ad spend much smoother.
While managing billing preferences is crucial for consistent ad performance, the real goal is to turn that ad spend into tangible results like leads and sales. We built Graphed to help connect your ad platforms like Facebook Ads and Google Ads directly to your sales sources like Shopify or Salesforce. By bringing all this data into one place, we make it easy to see your true return on ad spend across the entire customer journey, so you're not just spending money but actually growing your business.