Reddit has no fixed ad price. It sells ads by auction, and you pay per thousand impressions, per click or per video view, depending on your campaign’s objective and bidding. Reddit says fees start from about $5 a day, but it advises $100 or more a day for one to two weeks to test sales or leads: $700 to $1,400, or about $3,000 over 30 days. Reddit publishes no CPC or CPM benchmarks. The one figure we found tied to a named set of accounts is Refine Labs’ B2B awareness campaigns in Q1 2026, at $3.11 per click and $9.33 per thousand impressions. An agency fee, if you use one, is separate.
This guide rests on Reddit’s Help Center and Reddit for Business pages, checked on 4 November 2026, and on the published benchmarks those pages leave you to find elsewhere. We also read the 87 answers ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews gave to “How much does it cost to advertise on Reddit?” between 6 October and 4 November 2026, in our AI visibility tracker. No cost figure below comes from accounts we run; each one names its source.
How does Reddit charge for ads?
Your objective and bid strategy decide what you are billed for, according to Reddit’s objectives article.
| Objective | You optimise for | You pay |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness and consideration | Impressions, or 6-second or 15-second (beta) video views | CPM for impressions, CPV for video views |
| Traffic | Clicks, or landing page visits (beta) | CPC for clicks, CPM for landing page visits |
| Sales, lead generation, app promotion | Purchases, leads, sign-ups, installs and similar events | Optimised CPM (oCPM) on lowest cost or target cost; CPC on cost cap |
Three details in Reddit’s budgets and bidding article change the bill:
- Lowest cost is the default. Reddit sets the bid and tries to get the most results for your budget. On a conversion campaign that means oCPM, so the “CPC” in your report is a result of what you paid for impressions and not the unit you bought. The same article gives a traffic example where lowest cost bills impressions and cost cap bills clicks.
- Cost cap is leaving the lower funnel. From 10 February 2027 it will no longer be available for sales, lead generation or app promotion. Target cost, still in beta, needs at least 200 events in the last 28 days for sales and leads, or 120 for apps.
- Budgets are not exact. An ad group can overspend its budget by up to 20% or underspend it. A campaign spend cap, which is optional, is the hard limit: campaigns are never billed more than it.
Premium Takeovers sit outside the auction. They are sold on CPM to managed advertisers, and the Help Center gives no rate card, so ask a Reddit rep for a quote. To work with that team you must commit $10,000 or more a quarter or advertise in a sensitive category such as finance, alcohol or gambling. Four of the 87 AI answers gave $500 as the managed-service minimum; Reddit’s own page does not.
What budget does Reddit itself recommend?
Reddit’s advice depends on the page and the goal, and only the first line below is a floor:
| Reddit says | Applies to | Where |
|---|---|---|
| ”fees start as little as $5 per day” | Any campaign | Learning Hub, Nov 2025 |
| ”at least $50+/day” | Traffic | Launch checklist |
| ”$100+/day” | Purchases, leads, app promotion | Launch checklist |
| ”$100+/day for at least one week and up to two” | Lower-funnel tests | Learning Hub, Feb 2026 |
| ”at least 3x your target CPA” | Any budget | Learning Hub, Feb 2026 |
| ”Set your budget to achieve at least 20 optimization events” | New ad groups | Learning phase article |
Reddit also gives its reason for the higher figure: new SMB advertisers spending $100 a day saw over three times the conversions of those spending $50, on data from Q2 2025 to Q1 2026, in its campaign setup article. Reddit adds that results are not guaranteed, and it does not say how many advertisers that covers. Advertisers who spend more may also differ in other ways, so read it as Reddit’s argument and not as a controlled test.
The $5 figure is the one answer engines repeat most: 82 of the 87 answers gave it, and 41 gave the $100-a-day test advice. Only one mentioned the 3× CPA rule, which is the line that changes with your business. A line you may still see quoted, that each ad group needs at least $50 a day, was on Reddit’s setup article when we checked on 31 October 2026 and was gone on 4 November.
Reddit’s experts also offer $500 in ad credits when you spend $500. Read the terms before you plan around it. One advertiser reported in August 2026 missing the 30-day window after clicking the offer about a week before starting to spend.
Does Reddit publish CPC or CPM benchmarks?
No. We checked the Help Center’s budgeting, objectives, purchase and setup articles and the Reddit for Business cost pages, and none gives a typical CPC, CPM or CPV. Reddit’s CPM explainer calls the idea of a good CPM “misleading” and says there is “no single universal benchmark”. The $5 CPM in that article is a worked example of the formula, not a market rate.
What Reddit does publish is relative. Its SMB budgeting page reports “40% lower CPMs compared to benchmark” for one advertiser without giving the benchmark. So Reddit evidently holds internal baselines, and it does not release them. The only hard price on Reddit’s ad pages that we found is the $0.01 minimum CPV bid. Several guides also say Reddit runs a second-price auction; the Reddit pages we checked say “auction” and do not describe the pricing rule.
Which Reddit Ads benchmarks can you trust?
None is audited, and they differ in how much they tell you. Here is what each one says about itself, as read on 4 November 2026.
| Source and date | CPC | CPM | Stated method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Refine Labs, 1 Apr 2026 | $3.11 | $9.33 | Its managed accounts, awareness objective, Q1 2026. No account count or spend. |
| Affect Group, Jun 2026 | Not given | Average $5–$8 awareness, $6–$10 traffic, $12–$20 conversions | US, its client accounts at 90% weight and outside sources at 10%. No account count or spend. |
| Stackmatix benchmarks, 3 Sep 2026 | $0.50–$3.50, median $1.25 | $3–$12, median $6.50 | ”Aggregated campaign performance” in four verticals. No sample or period. |
| Stackmatix cost guide, 8 Jul 2026 | $0.20–$4.00 | $0.50–$15 | None on the page, and wider than the same publisher’s table above. |
| Aimers, 28 Oct 2026 | $0.50–$7 | $3.50–$20 | ”Most published benchmarks”; asks you to treat them as directional. |
| PPC Land, 21 Dec 2023 | $0.10 minimum bid | $3.50 minimum bid | States minimum bids. Not on the current Reddit pages we checked. |
The ranges you see most often have no stated method. $0.20 or $0.50 to $4.00 per click appeared in 50 of the 87 AI answers, and a CPM range ending at $15 in 53. They trace to pages like those above. FeedHeat, which reprints such figures, says plainly that the agency figures it uses publish no methodology, sample size or date range. RECHO, one of the pages Google’s AI Overviews cite on this question, says there is no single reliable average and labels its own examples as hypothetical.
The $3.50 CPM minimum looks out of date. It comes from a 2023 article. Advertisers have since reported paying well under it: $0.70 effective CPM in the May 2024 thread in the table below, and under $1 in an April 2025 thread.
Refine Labs is the best-described figure, and it is narrow. It covers one agency’s B2B awareness campaigns, so it says little about a DTC conversion campaign. It is at least consistent: a 0.30% CTR means 3 clicks per 1,000 impressions, and $9.33 ÷ 3 = $3.11. That is also the conversion to use on your own numbers: CPC = CPM ÷ (CTR × 10, with CTR in percent).
What do advertisers report paying?
First-person reports are useful for one thing: they show how far apart results can sit. They are anecdotes, self-reported and unaudited, and people are more likely to post about failures.
| Reported in | Spend | Campaign | Reported result |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 2024, r/SaaS | US$50 | SaaS at $2.50 a month | $0.26 CPC, $0.70 eCPM, 225 clicks, 0 sign-ups |
| May 2026, r/founder | C$1,002 | SaaS, career subreddits | $0.77 CPC (currency as posted), 1,296 clicks, 0 sign-ups |
| Oct 2026, r/RedditforBusiness | $106 | Web app, leads, 6 days | $0.17 CPC, 3.43% CTR, 2 users |
| Sep 2025, r/gamedev | €3,594 | Indie game, 5 bursts | €0.33–€0.56 per Steam wishlist |
| Sep 2026, r/PPC comment | $8,000 budget | B2B SaaS client | $180 CPA against a $60 target, stopped on day 12 |
The pattern in these reports is that a cheap click predicted little. The reported clicks run from $0.17 to $0.77, towards the low end of the ranges above, and none of the four software campaigns reported an acceptable cost per customer. Budget against the cost of a conversion, and if you get clicks without results, check tracking and setup first.
What pushes Reddit ad costs up or down?
Reddit names four CPM factors (industry, audience, placement, format) and three auction factors (bid, targeting, creative). It attaches no numbers to them. Where a number exists, it comes with this source:
- Objective. In Affect Group’s table, the average conversion-campaign CPM ($12–$20) is more than double the awareness average ($5–$8). Paying more per impression can still mean paying less per customer, which Reddit’s CPM explainer also points out.
- Bid strategy and campaign type. Reddit credits automated bidding with 17% lower CPAs (internal data, 2023–2024) and Max campaigns with 17% lower costs or CPA, from 17 split tests of 21 days each in mid-2025. Both are Reddit’s own figures.
- Changes mid-flight. Bid or budget changes above 20% can put an ad group back into learning, and an ad group still learning after seven days is marked Learning Limited, so frequent edits cost you data.
- Time. Refine Labs saw Reddit’s B2B awareness CPM rise 36.8% and its CPC 67.3% year on year to Q1 2026. A range from 2024 may be well out of date.
- Creative that fits the community. Reddit lists creative as an auction factor, and it is the one you control most directly. How the audience reacts is a separate matter, covered in why Reddit ads get downvoted. Format requirements are on our Reddit ad specs page.
How do you work out a test budget?
Start from your target cost per conversion, not from a CPC. Reddit’s guidance gives three tests, and you take the highest. The figures below are arithmetic on those rules, not forecasts.
- The floor: $100 a day for a lower-funnel test.
- The 3× rule: three times your target CPA. Reddit does not say whether this is daily or per ad group; we read it as the daily budget of one ad group, the stricter practical reading.
- The learning rule: 20 optimisation events within the seven days before an ad group is marked Learning Limited, so 20 × CPA ÷ 7.
| Target CPA | 3× CPA, per day | 20 events in 7 days, per day | Daily test budget | First 7 days | 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $20 | $60 | $57 | $100 (floor) | $700 | $3,000 |
| $60 | $180 | $171 | $180 | $1,260 | $5,400 |
| $150 | $450 | $429 | $450 | $3,150 | $13,500 |
| $400 | $1,200 | $1,143 | $1,200 | $8,400 | $36,000 |
These assume you hit your target, which a new campaign often will not, so a real test may reach 20 events later or not at all. They also cover one ad group. Each extra ad group needs its own budget, unless you use campaign budget optimisation, which Reddit says learns at campaign level and needs fewer events in total. If $100 a day is out of reach, Reddit suggests optimising for an earlier event: “Move to PageVisit on lower budgets.”
To see what a budget buys in impressions and clicks, use your own CPM once you have it. At Refine Labs’ B2B awareness figures, $3,000 buys about 321,500 impressions and 965 clicks. A conversion campaign could look quite different.
What does an agency charge on top of ad spend?
The fee and the media budget are two separate bills. Ad spend goes to Reddit in every model below; what changes is how the agency’s fee moves as spend grows. Published models, as fetched from the agencies’ own pages on 4 November 2026:
| Monthly ad spend | Flat from $1,900 (Verticality) | 15% of spend, $1,500 minimum | $3,000 or 12% of spend, whichever is higher |
|---|---|---|---|
| $3,000 | $1,900 fee, $4,900 total | $1,500 fee, $4,500 total | $3,000 fee, $6,000 total |
| $10,000 | $1,900 fee, $11,900 total | $1,500 fee, $11,500 total | $3,000 fee, $13,000 total |
| $30,000 | $1,900 fee, $31,900 total | $4,500 fee, $34,500 total | $3,600 fee, $33,600 total |
The third model also has a $2,500 setup fee, left out of the totals, and the agency behind the second also sells fixed pricing from $2,500. A percentage fee is cheaper at low spend: the 15% model stays below $1,900 until spend passes about $12,700 a month. Above that, a flat fee costs less, and it takes away the agency’s incentive to recommend more spend.
Our Reddit Ads management costs from $1,900 a month, flat and month-to-month, with no setup fee and no percentage of ad spend. The fee moves with markets, campaigns, creative volume and CRM reporting, never with your spend. It adds $900 a month when bought with an organic Reddit programme and is included in the $5,000 Category programme. We recommend ad spend from $3,000 a month for a conversion test. That figure is our own arithmetic on Reddit’s $100-a-day guidance, not a Reddit number. You pay the ad spend to Reddit from your own account. All our prices are on the pricing page.
If you are weighing other channels, we break down what Reddit marketing agencies charge for organic work and what a GEO agency costs in separate guides, and we compare agencies in the best Reddit Ads agencies.
