Every Bitcoin payment carries a small bid for space in the next block. Here is how that bid is priced, why it sometimes explodes, and why miners watch it closely.
By Michal Beno, CEO, OneMiners19 October 2026
A Bitcoin transaction fee is a small amount you attach to a payment so a miner includes it in a block. Fees are priced by size in data, not by amount sent, in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB). On 6 October 2026 a normal payment confirmed for about 1 to 2 sat/vB, a few cents. Fees go to miners on top of the 3.125 BTC block subsidy, and today they make up only about 0.6% of miner revenue.
1-2 sat/vB
fee for next-block confirmation
0.020 BTC
fees per block, 30-day mean
0.64%
fee share of miner revenue
37.63 BTC
fees in halving block 840,000
mempool.space API, 6 October 2026 (last 4,320 blocks, heights 965,844 to 970,163) and block 840,000 of 20 April 2024.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What is a Bitcoin transaction fee?
When you send bitcoin, your wallet creates a transaction: a signed message that moves coins from one address to another. The fee is not written as a separate line. It is simply the difference between what goes in and what comes out. If your wallet spends an input of 100,000 satoshis and sends out 99,700 satoshis (to the recipient plus your change), the missing 300 satoshis are the fee.
A satoshi, or sat, is the smallest unit of bitcoin: one hundred-millionth of a coin. Fees are almost always quoted in sats because they are tiny. At a Bitcoin price of about $85,739, one sat is worth about $0.00086.
That fee is collected by whichever miner puts your transaction into a block. Mining, in short, is the race to add the next block to the chain, explained step by step in the OneMiners guide to how Bitcoin mining works. The winner of each block keeps the new coins plus every fee inside it.
The mempool: Bitcoin's waiting room
A new block arrives roughly every 10 minutes, and each block has a hard size limit. Payments that have been broadcast but not yet confirmed wait in the mempool, short for memory pool. There is no single mempool: every node keeps its own copy of the waiting list, and they are nearly identical because nodes share transactions with each other.
Your wallet signs and broadcasts
The transaction, with its fee, is sent to a few Bitcoin nodes.
Nodes check and pass it on
Each node checks the signature and that the coins are unspent, then relays it. Within seconds it is in mempools worldwide.
Miners build a candidate block
A miner or pool sorts waiting transactions by fee per vbyte and fills the block from the top until it is full.
A block is found
When the miner's guess wins, the block is published. Your payment now has one confirmation.
Everyone else waits
Lower bids stay in the mempool for the next block. If they wait too long, some nodes may drop them, and the wallet can rebroadcast or raise the fee.
On 6 October 2026 the mempool held about 77,700 unconfirmed transactions, and a bid of 1 to 2 sat/vB was enough for the next block or two. That is a very quiet market. When thousands of people want in at the same time, the queue grows and the minimum winning bid climbs.
Why fees are priced in sat/vB, not by amount
A block has room for about 1,000,000 virtual bytes (vB). That limit comes from the 2017 SegWit upgrade (BIP 141), which counts block space in weight units: a block can hold 4 million, and one vbyte equals four weight units. Signature data is discounted, which is why newer address types make smaller transactions.
Because space is the scarce resource, miners care about how many bytes your transaction uses, not how much money it moves. Sending 0.001 BTC and sending 100 BTC cost the same fee if the two transactions are the same size. The formula is simple:
THE FEE FORMULA
Fee (sats) = size (vB) x fee rate (sat/vB)
Typical payment: 141 vB x 2 sat/vB = 282 sats
In dollars: 282 / 100,000,000 x $85,739 = $0.24
Typical transaction sizes by type
Approximate sizes from BIP 141 weight rules. Every extra input (a coin being spent) adds size, so a wallet with many small coins pays more to empty. Fee rate as of 6 October 2026.
One typical payment at different fee rates
A 141 vB native SegWit payment. USD at BTC $85,739 (CoinGecko, 5 October 2026). 1 to 2 sat/vB was the next-block rate on 6 October 2026; 200 sat/vB is the kind of rate seen around the April 2024 halving.
How wallets choose a fee for you
Most people never type a fee rate. The wallet estimates one, usually offering choices such as low, medium and high priority. There are two main ways to make that estimate.
History-based estimates: Bitcoin Core's built-in estimator looks at how long transactions at each fee rate took to confirm in recent blocks, then picks a rate likely to confirm within your chosen number of blocks.
Mempool-based estimates: services such as mempool.space look at the current waiting list and project what the next few blocks will contain, then suggest the rate needed to make the cut.
Minimum floor: nodes will not relay transactions below a minimum rate. Bitcoin Core 30.0, released in October 2025, lowered its default relay floor to 0.1 sat/vB, although wallets and other nodes may still use higher floors.
If you pick too low a fee, two standard tools help. Replace-by-fee (RBF) lets you rebroadcast the same payment with a higher fee, and the new version replaces the old one in the mempool. Child-pays-for-parent (CPFP) lets the recipient spend the stuck coins with a high fee, so a miner who wants that fee must include both transactions together. Either way, the miner decides by fee per vbyte.
Fee spikes: Ordinals, BRC-20 and the halving block
Fees stay low most of the time, then jump when demand for block space suddenly surges. The recent spikes all had one thing in common: people competing to write something new to the chain at the same moment.
Recent fee spikes and what caused them
Monthly means computed from mempool.space daily block-fee averages, 6 October 2026. Ordinals launch date: 21 January 2023. Block 840,000: mempool.space.
Fees per block, monthly mean, 2023 to 2026
BTC paid in fees per block
The halving block is the most famous example. On 20 April 2024, the pool ViaBTC mined block 840,000, the first block with the reduced 3.125 BTC subsidy. It was also the block where the Runes token protocol went live, and traders bid huge fees to be included. The block paid 37.63 BTC in fees and 40.75 BTC in total, so fees were about 92% of the reward. According to The Block, the average fee per transaction that day hit a record $128.45, before dropping to about $34.80 the next day.
How much of miner revenue comes from fees in 2026?
Over the 30 days to 6 October 2026, miners collected about 13,588 BTC in total rewards. Of that, only about 87.6 BTC was fees, roughly 0.64%. The rest was the 3.125 BTC subsidy on every block. Per block, fees averaged about 0.020 BTC, around $1,739 at today's price, and the mean transaction paid about 429 sats.
Fees as a share of miner revenue, by year
Percent of total block rewards paid as fees
OneMiners calculation from mempool.space daily average fees and rewards per block, pulled 6 October 2026. 2026 figure covers the last 4,320 blocks.
The pattern is clear: fee share jumps in busy years, such as 2017 and the Ordinals era of 2023 and 2024, then settles back. In a quiet year like 2026, fees are a rounding error next to the subsidy. That is why hashprice, the revenue a miner earns per unit of hashrate, is often quoted subsidy only: about $0.0398 per TH/s per day on 5 October 2026.
Fees in one block: spikes vs today
BTC paid in fees per block
Source: mempool.space block data and block-fee history, pulled 6 October 2026. Monthly means are averages of daily block-fee averages.
Why fees matter more after every halving
The block subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks, about every four years. The next halving is expected around block 1,050,000 in spring 2028, when the subsidy falls to 1.5625 BTC. If fees stay where they are, their share of revenue roughly doubles each time, simply because the subsidy beside them shrinks.
Fee share if fees stay at today's level
Fees of 0.020 BTC per block vs the subsidy in each era
OneMiners calculation: fees / (subsidy + fees), holding fees at the 30-day mean of 0.0203 BTC per block (mempool.space, 6 October 2026). Subsidy schedule from the Bitcoin protocol. Illustration, not a forecast.
Block subsidy by halving era
Bitcoin protocol schedule: the subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks. Dates are approximate, about 144 blocks per day.
Over the long run, fees have to carry more of the load. The last fraction of new bitcoin is expected around the year 2140; after that, miners are paid by fees alone. Nobody knows what the fee market will look like decades out, but the direction is set by code: every four years, a bigger share of a miner's income depends on people paying to use the network.
For a miner today, the practical lesson is the same as always. You cannot control fees or the Bitcoin price. You can control how much electricity each terahash costs you. Efficient machines on cheap power keep the widest margin whether fees are quiet, as in 2026, or spiking, as in 2024. Treat a fee spike as a bonus, not as part of the plan.
Antminer S21 Pro 245T$2,299Hashrate245 TH/sEfficiency15.00 J/THPower draw3,675 WBreak-even power$0.111/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$5.52View on OneMiners
Antminer S21 XP Hyd 473T$6,199Hashrate473 TH/sEfficiency12.00 J/THPower draw5,676 WBreak-even power$0.138/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$12.29View on OneMiners
Antminer S23 Hyd 580T$12,299Hashrate580 TH/sEfficiency9.50 J/THPower draw5,510 WBreak-even power$0.175/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$16.74View on OneMiners
Three efficiency tiers on the OneMiners catalogue, live prices 6 October 2026. Card figures use hashprice including recent fees, at $0.048 per kWh. At today's numbers, not a promise of future revenue.
Fees are the part of mining revenue that grows in importance with every halving, and the part nobody can predict. The smart response is to keep running costs low enough that the subsidy alone covers the power bill, and to treat fee spikes as upside. OneMiners hosting starts from $0.048 per kWh, and from $0.0364 per kWh on a 7-year prepaid contract. Check any model in the mining calculator.
Frequently asked questions
Who receives Bitcoin transaction fees?
The miner or mining pool that includes the transaction in a block. Pools then share block rewards, including fees, with their members according to the work each contributed.
Why is my Bitcoin transaction stuck?
Its fee rate is below what miners currently need to fill a block. You can raise it with replace-by-fee if your wallet supports it, or the recipient can use child-pays-for-parent.
Does sending more bitcoin cost a bigger fee?
No. Fees depend on the transaction's size in vbytes, not the amount. A payment with many inputs costs more than one with a single input, whatever the value.
What is a normal Bitcoin fee in 2026?
On 6 October 2026, about 1 to 2 sat/vB was enough for the next block, roughly 141 to 282 sats for a typical payment, a few U.S. cents.
Do fees matter for small miners?
Yes, indirectly. Members of a pool usually receive a share of fees along with the subsidy, so higher fees mean slightly higher daily payouts. In 2026 they add well under 1%.
Fees are a bonus. Cheap power is the plan. Compare Bitcoin miners and hosting from $0.048 per kWh.
Open the mining calculatorSee hosting locationsSOURCES AND DATA
- Recommended fee rates, mempool size, reward statistics (last 144 and 4,320 blocks): mempool.space API, 6 October 2026
- Monthly and yearly fees per block, fee share by year: OneMiners calculation from mempool.space block-fee and block-reward history, pulled 6 October 2026
- Block 840,000 (20 April 2024, ViaBTC, 37.63 BTC fees, 40.75 BTC total): mempool.space block data, checked 6 October 2026
- Record average fee of $128.45 on 20 April 2024: The Block, 22 April 2024
- Ordinals launch on 21 January 2023: Casey Rodarmor's Ordinals protocol announcement as reported in industry coverage
- Bitcoin Core 30.0 default relay floor of 0.1 sat/vB: Bitcoin Core 30.0 release notes, October 2025
- Block weight limit and vbytes: BIP 141 (SegWit), activated August 2017
- BTC price $85,739 and hashprice: CoinGecko and mempool.space, 5 October 2026
- Miner specs and prices: OneMiners catalogue, 6 October 2026
- Hosting rates: published OneMiners location pages
Michal Beno
CEO of OneMiners, the global Bitcoin mining hosting and hardware platform with 15 published hosting locations, 7-year fixed electricity contracts and a 7-year hardware warranty. He writes about the economics of industrial Bitcoin mining.
Informational only, not financial advice. Figures are a snapshot from public market data and news reports as of 5 October 2026 and can change quickly. Crypto prices can fall as well as rise. No return is offered or implied. Do your own research.
