Minimum Budget Requirement for Demand Gen Campaigns

Starting on April 1st, 2026, the Google Ads API will begin enforcing a minimum daily budget of 5 USD, or the equivalent in local currency, for all Demand Gen campaigns. This update ensures that campaigns have adequate budget to navigate the initial "cold start" phase, during which our models learn and optimize for performance.

This change is being implemented as an unversioned update across the Google Ads API, providing consistency across all buying doors.

Technical details and error handling

Depending on the version of the API you are using, you will encounter different behaviors when a budget below the 5 USD floor is specified for a Demand Gen campaign:

• Google Ads API v21 and above: You will receive a BUDGET_BELOW_DAILY_MINIMUM error when creating or updating a campaign with an insufficient budget. You can also refer to the details.budget_per_day_minimum_error_details field for further details about the minimum budget, such as the actual minimum threshold.
• Google Ads API v20: The API will return a generic UNKNOWN error code. To identify this specific validation failure, you must check the details.unpublished_error_code field, which will contain the string CampaignBudgetError.BUDGET_BELOW_DAILY_MINIMUM.

The validation will trigger whenever a campaign's budget, start time, or end time is modified in a way that results in a daily budget below the floor. This applies to both daily budgets and flighted (custom) budgets.

Impact on existing campaigns

Existing Demand Gen campaigns that currently operate with a budget below the 5 USD threshold will continue to serve without interruption. However, any future modifications to these campaigns' budgets or durations will be subject to the new validation rules. To make a change to these campaigns, the budget must be increased to at least the minimum required floor.

Next steps

We recommend that developers update their reporting and management systems to handle these new error codes.

If you have any questions regarding this change, get Google Ads API support.

 - Mattia Tommasone, Google Ads API Team