Short answer: Active with $0.00 spent is not a bug report and rarely a review problem. It is almost always one of a short list of account, schedule, budget, audience or bid settings, and check in this order: the Delivery column and Ads tab, then whether the whole account is at zero (spending limit, payment method, start date, restrictions), then whether you are optimizing for an event with no history in Events Manager, then whether a cost goal or bid cap sits below the going rate. The third one caught my own account on its first campaign.
Active describes a switch, not delivery. An ad set that reads Active and has spent $0.00 is almost always carrying an instruction Meta cannot execute — most often ads that are still in review, an optimization event with no history behind it, or a cost control set below what the auction is charging. Read the spend column rather than the status column, and open the Ads tab before the ad set tab.
I work on Everix, an AI media buyer that flags an ad set that has stopped delivering and says why (7-day free trial). A large part of what I do all day is read Meta ads help posts and answer them. "Active but not spending" is the one I see more than any other. It is also the one that caught me. The first time I put real money through our own brand-new ad account I ran two lanes. One of them spent $1.60 across 55 impressions, 9 clicks and 6 store visits, which is a small number but a working one. The other spent nothing at all — not a cent, not a single impression, for the entire time it was live — and I could not find anything wrong with it, because there was nothing wrong with it. I come back to that one below. It is the cause people find last.
Below, the checks in the order that resolves them fastest, not the order that makes them interesting. Most people find their answer in the first two.
Why is my Facebook ad active but not spending?
Start here, because this is the most common version and it usually costs you nothing but a look.
- Symptom: the ad set says Active, spend is $0.00, and nothing on the screen is red.
- Test: switch the view to the Ads tab and read the status column there. Then look one level up at the campaign row.
- Fix: an ad set can sit Active with every ad under it still In Review, and an ad set with no approved ad has nothing to deliver. This one resolves itself — in my experience review usually clears inside a day. Meta documents the state on its help page "About Ads In Review". A paused campaign with an active ad set inside it also delivers nothing, and the ad set still shows Active.
The reason this is worth doing first is that "Active" is reported at three levels and people habitually read only the middle one.
Facebook ad account not spending
If every campaign in the account is at zero, stop debugging campaigns. The cause is a level above them, and none of these announce themselves on the campaign row.
- Symptom: not one ad set is delivering, across campaigns you did not change together.
- Test: Billing, then Payment settings, then the account's schedule. Check Account Quality under Business Support Home separately.
- Fix: the four that account for most of it — an ad account spending limit that cumulative spend has reached, which pauses everything while the campaigns keep saying Active (Meta's page is "About Ad Account Spending Limits"); a declined payment method, where the notification lands in the Business account rather than in the campaign; a start date in the future or a dayparting window that has not opened; and an account-level restriction such as business verification required or a payment risk review.
There is a fifth that people rarely know about, and it has its own Meta help page called "About Daily Spending Limits Set by Meta": Meta sets its own daily ceiling based on your advertising and payment history, and a brand-new account starts with a much lower one than an established account. It is not a fault and it does not appear anywhere in Ads Manager's campaign view. It simply caps what the account is allowed to do.
The one that caught me: purchase optimization on a dataset with no purchases
This is the cause that looks healthiest while delivering nothing, and it is the one I hit on my own account.
The setup was a sales campaign on a brand-new ad account with a brand-new dataset, optimizing for purchases, targeting one large market, both ads approved and ACTIVE, budget set. I checked the structure against every axis I could think of and it was correct on all of them. It spent nothing. Zero impressions, for the whole run.
The reason is not a bug and it is not a setting you have missed. When you optimize for purchases you are asking Meta to find people who resemble the people who already bought. On a dataset with no purchases in it, that instruction has no referent. Delivery never finds a bid it is confident enough to place, so it does not place one, and the campaign looks perfect the entire time it is doing nothing.
- Symptom: new ad account or new dataset, purchase optimization, correct structure, zero impressions rather than expensive ones.
- Test: open Events Manager and count how many times your dataset has actually recorded the event you are optimizing for. If the answer is zero, or close to it, you have found the cause.
- Fix: optimize one rung further down the funnel — add to cart, initiate checkout, or landing page views — until the dataset has enough events, then climb back up. Meta documents how delivery settles on its help page "About the Learning Phase"; the number I plan around is roughly 50 optimization events in a week, and an event you cannot get 50 of is an event you should not be optimizing for yet.
What this cost me was nothing, and that is the whole problem with it. A mistake that burns money announces itself on the first invoice. This one produces a perfectly clean account: no error, no warning, no charge, no state anywhere in the interface that means "the instruction you gave me cannot be carried out." The campaign simply declines to spend, and every screen keeps saying Active. I lost a day to it, which is cheap, and I only found it because I went looking at the spend column instead of the status column.
Facebook ads not spending budget
Two different mechanisms produce the same reading here, and they need opposite responses.
- Symptom: the ad set is eligible and the account is healthy, but the daily budget goes unspent, or one ad set sits at $0.00 while its neighbours spend.
- Test: look at the ad set's bid strategy first, then look at the campaign row above it.
- Fix: a cost per result goal or bid cap set under the going rate for your audience does not produce expensive delivery, it produces no delivery — Meta will decline to bid rather than overpay. Raise it, or switch the ad set to highest volume for a day and watch whether spend starts. Separately, with campaign budget optimization the campaign decides which ad set gets the money and is entitled to give one everything and another nothing. An ad set at $0.00 inside a campaign that is spending normally is not broken; it lost the allocation.
The distinction matters because the first one is a mistake you made and the second one is the system working as designed.
Meta ads not spending the full daily budget
The partial version came up twice in threads I answered this week: the ad set delivers, just not all of the budget, day after day. Before treating that as a fault, check whether the week is short or only the day.
- Symptom: steady delivery, but each day lands under the daily budget, or a light day follows a heavy one.
- Test: add up the last seven days and compare the total with seven times the daily budget. Meta's page "About budgets" treats a daily budget as an average over a Sunday-to-Saturday week: some days can spend more than the budget and others less, and the week stops at seven times the budget. A light day after a heavy one is usually the same week being paced, which is the other half of why Meta sometimes spends more than the daily budget.
- Fix: if the week as a whole comes in short, it is usually one of three things. A cost per result goal or bid cap below the going rate, or a minimum ROAS above what the ads are returning, holds spend back the same way it stops it entirely in the section above. An audience too small for the budget runs out of people, so frequency climbs while spend flattens. And on a new ad account, the daily spending limit Meta sets from your payment history covers the whole account, so ad sets whose budgets add up to more than that limit share it and each comes in short.
What I would not do is raise the budget to force the spend. An ad set that cannot place the budget it has will not place a bigger one, and a large raise is a significant edit that restarts learning.
Facebook ads not spending today
Audience-side causes are less common than the two above but harder to see, because the ad set looks identical whether the audience is reachable or not.
- Symptom: delivery has never started, and the ad set's audience definition is narrow, layered, or recently built.
- Test: read the estimated audience size on the ad set, and check whether the ad set sits in a special ad category.
- Fix: stacked narrow interests plus exclusions plus a small geography can leave an audience Meta will not spend into. Practitioners writing in 2026 put the practical floor somewhere around 100,000 reachable people — that is a field report rather than a published Meta threshold, so treat it as a direction and not a line. Special ad categories (housing, employment, credit and financial products) force a broad age range and remove targeting options, and an ad set built before the category was declared can end up in a state it cannot deliver from. A custom audience that has not finished populating is, for delivery purposes, empty.
Facebook ads running but not spending
The last two are the ones where the correct action is to do nothing, which is why they are the hardest to follow.
- Symptom: the ad set is new, or somebody has been editing it, and delivery is stalled or erratic.
- Test: add the Last significant edit column in Ads Manager and read it before you touch anything else.
- Fix: significant edits — budget, targeting, optimization event, creative — restart the learning phase and start the clock over. An account where someone adjusts something every couple of days is an account whose ad sets have never once finished learning. And new ad sets on small daily budgets routinely spend nothing for the first several hours and then start. Check whether the campaign has actually had a full delivery day before you change anything, because changing things inside that window is how a slow start becomes a genuinely reset one.
If you keep one sentence from this page, keep the first one. Read the spend column, not the status column, and check the Ads tab before the ad set tab.
What I do differently now
Everix watches the account around the clock whether or not anyone opens Ads Manager, which is the only real advantage we have on this particular problem: a zero gets noticed on day one rather than day three. The causes above live in Meta's own state and the only way to find them is to go and look, so there is no cleverness available here and I am not going to pretend there is.
Since late October Everix also catches the partial version for you. When a lane spends under half of each day's budget several days running, it names the likely cause and the one thing to change, in the same order as above: the ROAS floor sits above what the ads return, so lower it; people are seeing the ads too often, so widen the audience; Meta is limiting a creative, so replace it; a creative is still in review, so wait; the placements were picked by hand, so check them; and if nothing in the lane explains it, the ad account's spending limit and payment method. That is the call a senior media buyer would make on your account each morning. Everix starts at $49 a month, with 7 days free.
The zero-spend campaign in section three was mine, on my account, and it was my mistake to make. This list is what I would have wanted on the first morning instead of the third.
Meta's own pages for the mechanisms above
- About Ads In Review — facebook.com/business/help/204798856225114
- About Ad Account Spending Limits — facebook.com/business/help/141820733085330
- About Daily Spending Limits Set by Meta — facebook.com/business/help/563129151097553
- About the Learning Phase — facebook.com/business/help/112167992830700