Google Ads credit, explained

by Harry Watts · Last reviewed 4 September 2026

The flat coupon everyone still writes about is gone. UK agency and hosting pages have been repeating the same universal spend-match figure for years, and what runs now is different: you are shown a set of offers at signup and you choose one of them. Google publishes none of the amounts. The terms document that governs the offer contains no currency figure anywhere in its twelve clauses, the help pages say only that criteria vary and you should review your own offer, and when I last loaded the UK landing page it served the credit, the maximum and the spend that unlocks them as unfilled placeholders rather than numbers — the page could not resolve its own offer. None of which would matter much, except that the current structure attaches four separate deadlines running from four different events, and most of what goes wrong is somebody who met one of them and missed another. Below is the offer as the terms describe it, in the order things happen to you rather than in the order it is sold, because the sequence is where it fails.

The four clocks

If you read nothing else: 14 days to apply the offer, 60 days to hit the spend requirement, up to 35 days for the credit to appear, and 60 days to spend it before it lapses.

The first is missed because people set up an account, run it for a fortnight and then go looking for the offer. The second is missed because it starts later than people assume. The third is not missed at all, it is misread as failure. The fourth is missed because nothing tells you the clock is running. Everything else on this page is either one of those four or a rule about who qualifies.

One caveat on the first, because Google's own documents disagree. The terms say the offer must be applied within 14 days of your first ad impression being served. The help pages say your account must be less than 14 days old at redemption. Those are different events and they can be a week apart. Work to the tighter of the two, which means treating the fortnight as running from the day you opened the account.

What the offer looks like now

One UK signup screen, 31 August 2026. Google publishes none of these figures and yours may differ. Your own screen governs.

Non-round numbers on both sides, which is the tell that these are not a published rate card. The US version of the same terms document names a completely different ladder in dollars, which is one reason the dollar figures quoted on most pages ranking for this are no use to you.

The important thing is that the tiers get worse as they get bigger. The lowest returns a pound for every pound committed; the highest returns about sixty-nine pence. You are being offered a larger credit in exchange for a lower rate and a much larger commitment — on the same 60-day clock.

So choose the tier whose spend requirement matches what you were going to spend anyway. Not the biggest credit, not the best rate. If your plan was to test Google Ads at around a thousand pounds over two months, the top tier is free money. If your plan was £400 and you take the top tier because the number is bigger, you have committed to two and a half times your budget on a deadline, and the terms give no indication that falling short earns anything at all. Assume missing the requirement by a pound pays the same as not trying.

Who qualifies

• New to Google Ads, with a UK billing address. One offer per advertiser. The contracting entity is Google Ireland.
• Never advertised for this business before, under any account. This is the rule that catches re-registered companies and second attempts. Google's wording is that you cannot have advertised before using a different account for the same business.
• Payment details added during signup. Not later. The terms require a payment profile and a valid payment method during the initial signup process, or the offer is not applied at all.
• While supplies last. Google reserves the right to withdraw the offer, and separately to revoke it at any time for any reason.
• Not available on request. Google states that promotional offers are not available by request. Support cannot issue you one, and neither can anybody else outside the Partners route below.

What counts towards the spend requirement

Less than you would think, and the gaps all run the same way.

• VAT does not count. The requirement is measured on costs excluding taxes and fees, so more leaves your account than the threshold you are chasing.
• Spend before you applied the offer does not count. Google counts only what you spend after redeeming. A fortnight of testing before you noticed the offer bought you nothing towards it.
• The credit cannot count. Google states that promotional credits cannot cover the spend requirement itself, and cannot be applied to costs accrued before the credit was applied.

The one that catches people out: your billing settings can void the offer silently

The least discussed part of the whole arrangement, and the most expensive.

Changing your billing setup after entering the offer invalidates it. If you intend to use monthly invoicing, Google's instruction is to set it up before you enter the offer, because otherwise the offer is invalidated and the amount lost when you switch. And if the account changes hands, active promotional credits are not transferred and not refunded on a billing transfer or a change of account ownership. Which is to say: the exact thing a business does when it hands a new account to someone to run can destroy the credit it was set up to earn.

There is a smaller version on manual payments. Google warns that you need to fund above the requirement, because if the balance runs out serving stops, and the 60 days do not.

Where to look: Billing → Promotions. The active offer, the spend requirement and your progress towards it are all on that page, and it is the only place any of it is visible. Nothing notifies you when the credit runs out either, so it is where you find that out too.

After you qualify

Google allows itself up to 35 days to apply the credit once the requirement is met. This is worth knowing before you start, because a credit that has not turned up yet is indistinguishable from a credit that is never coming — and Google's support forum carries a steady traffic of people in the first situation who believe they are in the second.

When it arrives it draws down automatically against your costs, shown under active promotions, and it expires 60 days after being applied whether you have used it or not. Unused credit is not refundable. So it is not a cushion you can save for later. It is a second, faster budget with its own deadline, and it needs a plan before it lands — ideally the same plan that got you through phase one.

The agency route, and what it costs you

There is a second programme with much larger numbers, exclusive to Google Partners and Premier Partners. Its published ladder runs seven rungs, from $500 of credit against $500 of spend up to $6,000 against $12,000, in dollars or local equivalent. Those offers cannot be requested from Google and are not available at signup.

Four things are worth knowing before taking one. The client account must have no other promotion applied, so a signup offer already on the account blocks it. The client must be within 20 days of account creation rather than the 14 that applies to the public offer, which is one reason the two get conflated. A partner can only issue offers up to a percentage of their own recent spend, capped at 15% of their last 90 days, so any page describing a large "pool" is describing something that does not work the way it sounds.

And then the part that matters most: the current rules move new-customer verification from before the offer is applied to after the client reaches the required spend. You can be given an offer, spend the full requirement against it, and only then have your eligibility checked.

What you will read elsewhere that is wrong

• "Spend £400, get £400." The old universal UK coupon, superseded by the choose-your-offer flow, still on the front page of several UK agency and hosting sites. One of them last updated in January 2024 and headlines it with the word "today".
• "Google is giving 2× credit." A trade story in May 2026 reported new accounts getting double their spend back, citing a LinkedIn post. The spend figures quoted are exactly the first three rungs of Google's published Partners table, where the credits are equal to or lower than the spend and never double it. It is a misread table that has been repeated as fact since.
• Dollar figures with no UK equivalent. Most of the pages ranking for these queries quote US amounts only, on an offer whose own terms warn that a mismatch between your account currency and the credit currency exposes both the threshold and the credit to exchange rate movement.

Quick answers

Everything expensive about this offer is a deadline nobody told you was running, and everything that would have warned you sits on one billing page most advertisers visit once. If a number matters to your decision, screenshot your own offer screen the day you see it — it is the only record of it that will exist.