AdMob pays on a schedule, not on request, and the schedule is unforgiving: Google's own documentation states that if your balance does not meet the payment threshold on the 20th, or if any hold is active on the account, you are not paid that month and the balance simply rolls into the next cycle. That single sentence explains most of the "AdMob is not paying me" complaints. The money is not lost — but a whole month is, and it repeats for as long as the missing checkbox stays missing.

This is the pre-flight checklist for an AdMob account that is supposed to convert revenue into a bank account. Every number below is Google's, from the payment, threshold, PIN, app-ads.txt, consent and policy pages linked at the end.

The five numbers worth memorising: $10 — the verification threshold and the payment-method threshold. $100 — the payment threshold. 45 days — how long you have to submit identity documents once asked. 3 weeks — typical PIN mailer delivery. 4 months — how long you have from PIN generation before ads stop.

1. Know which threshold you just crossed

AdMob has more than one threshold, and they trigger different obligations. In USD the published table is: tax information $0, verification (identity / address) $0 and $10, payment method selection $10, payment $100, and cancellation $10. Thresholds are measured on the payment history page, not on estimated earnings — a distinction that matters when revenue is still provisional.

Practical consequence: hitting $10 is not "almost getting paid", it is the point at which Google requires identity and address verification and lets you register a form of payment. Hitting $100 on the 20th is what actually produces a payment. See Payment thresholds.

2. Submit tax information, even when the threshold is $0

Depending on your payment address, Google is required to collect tax-related information, and a missing tax form is a first-class reason for a hold. The AdMob hold documentation is explicit that you can remove this hold by submitting your tax information to Google. The same location-based logic drives the withholding rate, so the form must match the country of the payments address, not the country where the app was built. See Why your AdMob account has a payment hold.

3. Treat identity verification as a 45-day clock, not a task

When AdMob asks you to verify your identity, you have 45 days from the date of the first request to submit the required documents in the account. The stakes are stated plainly: verification is what keeps ads showing and payments flowing. Two operational notes: the payment name and address must be correct first, because Google uses exactly that information to verify identity and to mail the PIN, and the PIN is not sent at all until identity verification succeeds. See Steps to getting paid.

4. Make sure the payment address can receive ordinary mail

Address verification is physical. Google mails a 6-digit PIN on a white 4.5 × 6 inch postcard, by international standard mail, with no tracking number. If the address cannot receive plain mail — a virtual office that only accepts parcels, a unit number that gets dropped by the carrier — the PIN never arrives and the account stalls.

The timeline is fixed: roughly 3 weeks for the mailer to arrive, and 4 months from the date the PIN is generated to complete verification. If it is not verified after 4 months, ads stop showing. If the mailer is lost, a replacement can be requested — up to 3 additional PINs — and if the 4th request still produces nothing after 3 weeks, Google's PIN troubleshooter is the next step. An address previously associated with fraudulent activity is not reusable; a new valid postal address is required. See Address verification (PIN) overview.

5. Register a form of payment before the money exists

Payment-method selection unlocks at $10, and it is a separate gate from the $100 payment threshold. Bank details, the payee name on the account and the payment profile should be settled while the balance is small — that is the cheapest moment to discover that the payee name does not match the identity documents. Google's payment chain lists it explicitly as one of the steps between earning the minimum and the payment being sent.

6. Put the 20th and the 21st in the calendar

The cycle is brutally literal: changes made to payment settings after the 20th of any month do not take effect until the following month's cycle, and the balance on the 20th must have reached the payment threshold. Payments are then issued on or around the 21st (or the first business day after it), and for Hyperwallet-based payouts the funds can take 1–2 days to become available, with an email notification at that point. Read as an operating rule: any payment detail you plan to change this month is a next-month change if you touch it after the 20th. See Payments and transactions.

7. Audit the six holds before blaming the bank

Google lists the holds that stop a payment, each with a single fix: tax information not submitted; identity not verified; address not verified (the PIN); no form of payment configured; a self-hold where you paused payments yourself and forgot; and a compliance hold on the account. The Payments page shows an alert naming the hold and the required action. Checking that alert on the 21st is a ten-second habit that saves a 30-day wait.

8. Publish app-ads.txt and confirm it is verified

app-ads.txt is a text file at the root of your developer website, containing your publisher ID in the IAB Tech Lab's Authorized Sellers for Apps format — for example google.com, pub-0000000000000000, DIRECT. Your publisher ID must be present and correctly formatted or the file will not verify; if you also use other ad networks, their seller IDs belong in the same file so that they can find it too. AdMob typically needs about 24 hours to detect changes, and the account shows a status per app. An unverified file is a demand-side problem, not a display problem: ads still render, revenue is just worth less than it should be. See Set up an app-ads.txt file.

9. Do not serve personalized ads in Europe without a certified CMP

Under the EU User Consent Policy, publishers using AdMob (or AdSense / Ad Manager) must use a CMP that Google has certified and that integrates with the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework when serving personalized ads in specific regions. The dates are hard: EEA and the UK from 16 January 2024, and Switzerland from 31 July 2024. If a meaningful share of installs sits in Europe, this is not a legal footnote — it is an ad-serving configuration that should be checked before the first invoice. See Google consent management requirements.

10. Treat invalid traffic as an account-level risk, not a metrics problem

Invalid traffic covers deliberately fraudulent traffic and accidental clicks, and the definition list is worth reading against your own implementation: publishers clicking their own live ads; repeated clicks from one or more users; any messaging that encourages users to click ads; ad implementations that cause a high volume of accidental clicks; automated clicking tools, robots or deceptive software.

The published consequence is proportionate and terminal: high levels of invalid traffic can lead to suspension or disabling of the account, and where traffic quality cannot be verified, ad serving may be limited or disabled. The same page explains one of the most misread lines in AdMob reporting — estimated earnings and finalized earnings legitimately differ, because invalid traffic is filtered out before the books are closed. See Invalid traffic (AdMob) and Invalid traffic (AdSense).

11. Keep ad placement inside the policy

AdMob participation requires compliance with the AdSense program policies in full, and the sections most often broken by app developers are invalid clicks and impressions, ad placement, and invalid activity. In practice: no ads placed where a tap is ambiguous or where the ad overlaps a button's hit area, no ads whose only purpose is to be tapped, and no implementation that trades user confusion for impressions. Google states that non-compliant accounts can have ad serving disabled and the AdMob account disabled at any time. See AdMob policies and restrictions.

12. Assume a disabled account is not recoverable by opening another

This is the check that portfolio operators skip. The policy page states the consequence without hedging: if your account is disabled, you are not eligible for further participation in the AdSense and/or AdMob program(s). Combined with the fact that invalid traffic and placement violations are the enforcement triggers, the rational conclusion is that the monetization account is the asset to protect — one account, clean traffic, documented identity, verified address — and that concentrating several apps behind a single weak implementation puts all of them behind the same enforcement decision.

The pattern behind the twelve checks

Nothing on this list is a negotiation and almost nothing is reversible on demand. AdMob's payment chain is a sequence of gates — $10 to be verifiable, 45 days to be verifiable in time, one postcard to be addressable, $100 on the 20th to be paid — and each gate has a published deadline rather than a support queue. The accounts that get paid on the 21st every month are not lucky; they finished the paperwork while the balance was still $3.

Run this as a monthly five-minute audit: Payment thresholds table matched to your currency, tax info present, identity verified, PIN entered, payment method set, no holds on the Payments page, balance above $100 on the 20th, app-ads.txt verified, consent configured for European traffic, and traffic logs free of anything that looks like a self-click.

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