Daily vs Lifetime Budget

A daily budget is the average amount you let Meta spend each day an ad set runs, while a lifetime budget is one total figure for the whole run that Meta paces out across the days you have scheduled.

When you build an ad set you have to tell Meta how much you are willing to spend, and this is the screen where you make that choice. Say you set a daily budget of 1,000 rupees. Meta will aim to spend roughly that amount every single day the ad set is live, so across a 30 day run you are pointing it at about 30,000 rupees in total without ever having to name that number. Now say instead you set a lifetime budget of 30,000 rupees over the same 30 days. The total is the same, but the pacing is different, because Meta will spend more on the days it sees strong opportunity and less on the quiet days, always keeping the whole run inside that total. Open your own ad set right now and look at the Budget field: whatever number sits there is either a per day average or a whole-run total depending on which of the two you picked, and it is worth knowing which one you are actually running.

This matters because the two choices behave differently in ways that hit your results. Daily is the simplest and the most common pick, and for most accounts it is the right default because you always know your rough spend for any given day. Lifetime is the one you need when you want to schedule your ads to run only at certain hours or certain days of the week, what people call dayparting, since Meta only offers that scheduling control on a lifetime budget. So the question is less about which is better and more about whether you need hour-level control or not.

Remember that "daily" is an average, not a hard ceiling on any single day. Meta's own documented behavior is that it can spend up to about 25 percent over your daily number on a high-opportunity day, then make it up by spending less on your slower days so the week evens out. So if you set 1,000 a day and one day reads higher, that is the system working as designed and not a billing error you need to chase.

Pick daily unless you need to control the clock, and let the average even itself out.