Your Google Ads spend went up in June and nobody told you
Since 1 June, Google paces scheduled campaigns towards the full monthly cap. If you run business-hours-only ads and have not touched your budgets since, you have been paying more for five months.
Tom BarberPPC
On 1 June 2026, Google changed how it paces budgets on campaigns with an ad schedule. Five months on, most of the small businesses we speak to still have not heard about it, and a good number have been quietly spending more ever since.
What changed
Before June, if you set a daily budget of £100 and only ran ads Monday to Friday, Google paced your spend across the days the ads actually ran. You would land somewhere near £2,200 for the month.
Since June, Google paces every campaign towards 30.4 times the daily budget, whatever your schedule says. The ads still do not run on days you have switched off. It just spends harder on the days they do run to make up the difference. That same campaign now paces towards £3,040.
Why you probably did not notice
Because nothing broke. The billing caps did not change: your monthly bill is still capped at 30.4 times the daily budget and your daily bill at twice it. No limit was breached, no alert fired, no notification went out. The spend simply drifted up towards a ceiling that had always been there and had never previously been reached.
If a schedule was on your account to hold spending down rather than to match when customers actually buy, that lever stopped working in June.
How to check in ten minutes
Pick any campaign with an ad schedule on it. Compare average monthly spend for January to May against June to October. If the second number is 20 to 40% higher with no changes from you, that is the pacing change rather than a seasonal swing.
Then ask the harder question: did the extra spend buy anything? Higher spend with proportionally more conversions is fine, and arguably the old pacing was holding you back. Higher spend at the same conversion count is five months of money gone. If you cannot answer that from your reporting, that is the first thing to fix.
What to do now
- Set your monthly number first and derive the daily figure from it, rather than the other way round. If £2,200 a month was the real budget, the daily figure is now about £72, not £100.
- Look honestly at why each schedule is there. If it reflects when your customers get in touch, keep it. If it was a spending brake, it is not one any more, and removing it usually gives the bidding more to work with.
- Set alerts on monthly spend, not daily. Under the new pacing a daily alert fires constantly and you will learn to ignore it.
What not to do
Do not cut budgets hard in reaction to this. You will reset learning on Smart Bidding and Performance Max and pay for it in performance. And do not assume it is a Search-only thing: it covers Search, Display, Demand Gen, Video and Performance Max.
Where Web & Roll can help
If you have not looked at this since the spring, we will go through your account, work out whether the change cost you anything, and reset your budgets and alerts around the new pacing. As a Google Partner agency it is part of how we run paid search for the accounts we manage.