How Much Do TikTok Ads Cost in the UK? (2026)

Most articles on this subject open with an average cost per thousand views, which is a strange way to answer a question about a platform that will not let you spend small in the first place.

The number that actually decides things for a local business is the minimum, and TikTok publishes it.

So that is where this starts. Everything below came off TikTok's own help pages rather than a roundup of somebody else's guesswork, and where TikTok does not publish a figure, we say so instead of filling the gap.

TikTok's published minimum budgets

These are the numbers that surprise people, and they are not industry rumour. TikTok's own budget documentation states them plainly, and we read the page on 20 August 2026.

Notice the shape of it. The campaign floor and the ad group floor are separate rules, both of which have to be satisfied at once. One campaign with a single ad group has to clear the higher of the two.

Three ad groups inside one campaign means three lots of the ad group minimum, which quietly lifts your real floor above the campaign figure without you touching the campaign setting at all.

Why that floor stops most small businesses dead

On Meta you can open an account, put a couple of pounds a day behind a post and learn something by Friday. It might not be a clever campaign, but the platform will take your money and show you what happens. TikTok will not. It declines the experiment before it starts.

That single design decision changes who TikTok advertising is for. It is not a channel you test with spare change while you get your bearings.

It is a channel you commit to for a month with a figure that, on TikTok's own numbers, works out at something like $1,500 of media across a thirty-day month, before anybody has made a video.

For a great many of the businesses we work with around Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster, that is the end of the conversation and it should be.

A mobile groomer with three spare slots a week does not need four figures of TikTok reach; she needs her Google profile sorted and a phone that gets answered. Being honest about that is cheaper for everybody than finding out in week three.

It also means the order of operations matters more here than on any other platform. If you have not yet worked out whether TikTok suits your business at all, do that before you look at budgets: our guide to whether TikTok is worth it for a UK local business walks through which trades earn attention on there and which are wasting their evenings. This article assumes you have already decided yes and want to know the damage.

What actually sets your cost per result

Above the minimum, TikTok prices by auction, in the same way the other platforms do. You are not buying a slot at a rate card price, you are bidding for attention alongside every other advertiser chasing that viewer, and the price moves with how crowded that contest is and how good your video happens to be.

You get two ways to steer it. TikTok documents both bidding strategies: Cost Cap, where the system aims delivery at a cost per action you nominate, though TikTok is upfront that the actual figure "can be slightly higher or lower than the target"; and Maximum Delivery, which simply chases the highest volume of conversions your budget will buy without targeting a price at all.

Cost Cap is the sensible starting point for a service business, because it lets you express the thing you actually care about.

You know roughly what a customer is worth to you. Tell the system what you are prepared to pay for one and let it work inside that, rather than handing it an open budget and hoping.

The learning phase, and the week it costs you

Every new campaign starts out guessing at who wants what you sell. TikTok calls this the learning phase and puts a shape on it: volatility starts to settle after roughly 25 campaign results, or seven days, whichever arrives first. Until then your cost per result bounces about and tells you very little.

Put that next to the minimums and the first month plans itself. Seven days at the campaign floor is seven times the daily minimum before you have learned anything reliable, and that is the tuition fee rather than a wasted week. Anyone judging TikTok on four days of data is reading noise and calling it a verdict.

TikTok is equally clear about what stops a campaign settling, and it is mostly things advertisers do to themselves. Its documentation names pausing campaigns or ad groups, edits that retrigger learning, and unreasonable budget or creative volume settings as the operations that keep you stuck in it.

• Leave it alone. The instinct on day two is to fiddle, and fiddling is precisely what restarts the clock you are paying for.
• Do not carve a small budget into several ad groups. Each one has its own minimum and its own learning to do, so splitting is how you fund three campaigns that all stay confused instead of one that gets somewhere.
• Give it the full week before you form an opinion, and the full month before you make a decision.

The cost that never makes it into anyone's budget: the video

TikTok is the one platform where the creative is not the packaging, it is the product. A still image with text on it, which will trundle along quite happily on Facebook, simply dies here. So the honest budget has a second line in it, and most people find that out late.

The good news is that the format rewards the cheap option. A clip shot on a handset at the job, with you talking over it, routinely outperforms something expensive and glossy, because it looks like the rest of the feed rather than an interruption to it. That is not a corner being cut, it is the medium working as intended.

The catch is volume. One video is not a campaign on TikTok: creative wears out faster here than anywhere else, so you need a supply of it rather than a hero piece.

If filming is genuinely not something you will ever get round to, our content creation service shoots it for you, from £350 for a full day. Cut properly into short pieces, a single day on camera can keep an ad group supplied for a whole season.

VAT on TikTok ads, which does not work like Meta's

This one is worth a minute of your time, because the two platforms handle it differently and people assume they match.

TikTok's guidance for UK advertisers says your business is charged the standard UK VAT rate of 20%. Supplying a valid VAT number gets you a full tax invoice, which is what you need to reclaim it. Leave the number out and you are treated as a final consumer for VAT purposes, and you still pay the 20% either way.

That is the opposite arrangement to the one Meta operates, where a VAT number on the account means the VAT is not charged in the first place and you handle it yourself under the reverse charge. Same tax, two different mechanisms, and only one of them punishes you for leaving a field blank.

So if you are VAT registered, put the number in before your first invoice rather than after. And if you are not registered, the 20% is a real cost you cannot recover, which means your true TikTok floor is a fifth higher than the minimum on the screen. Factor that in before you decide the budget is affordable.

Are TikTok ads cheaper than Facebook ads?

Almost the wrong question, and it is the one everybody asks. Cheaper per what? Attention on TikTok is often less contested than attention on Facebook, so a view can cost less.

But you cannot buy a small amount of it, the video costs more to make, and the audience skews younger, so a cheaper view is not automatically a cheaper customer.

The useful comparison is not price per view, it is price per customer, and you cannot know that until you have run both. If you are weighing up where a fixed budget should go across all the platforms rather than deep on one, our guide to social advertising costs in the UK sets Meta, TikTok and Google side by side and is the better place to start.

What a realistic first month looks like

Assuming you have decided TikTok fits, here is the shape we would put on a first attempt. It is deliberately unambitious, because the aim of month one is information rather than profit.

1. One campaign, one ad group. Do not split. Set the campaign at or just above TikTok's floor and leave it there.
2. Three to five videos in that one ad group, all genuinely different rather than three edits of the same clip. Creative variety is what the system has to work with.
3. Cost Cap bidding, with the cap set at what one customer is genuinely worth to you rather than at what you wish a lead cost.
4. Hands off for the first week. No edits, no pausing, no budget changes. You are paying for the learning phase whether you respect it or not.
5. Review at day thirty against cost per enquiry, not against views. Views are the vanity number on this platform more than any other.

If after a full month the cost of an enquiry is nowhere near what a customer is worth to you, stop. That is a clean answer and it cost you one month rather than a year of hoping. Plenty of good businesses get that answer and go and spend the money somewhere it works better.

What we charge to run TikTok ads

We charge £300 a month to manage paid campaigns, whichever platform they run on, and TikTok bolts onto an existing social plan for a further £50 monthly. Organic social management starts at £225 a month.

All of it is written down on the packages page, and your media budget is billed to you by TikTok directly with nothing skimmed off it on the way past. Our paid advertising service explains how the month actually runs.

We will also tell you when the answer is no. Given what TikTok demands as a minimum, that conversation happens more often on this platform than on any other, and we would rather have it before you spend than after.

Frequently asked questions

Deciding whether the number is worth it

What TikTok ads cost in the UK comes down to a floor you cannot negotiate and a video you have to keep making. If both of those are comfortable, it is a genuinely good place to buy attention cheaply. If either makes you wince, that is useful information and there are better homes for the money.

Either way, have a word with us. We will look at what you sell, who buys it, and what one of those buyers is worth, then say plainly whether TikTok deserves a line in your budget this year.