Bitcoin fee tracker

How to use these numbers

The bands matter more than the figures. During quiet periods they collapse together, and paying the next-block rate buys you nothing over the economy rate because there is no competition to outbid. During congestion they spread dramatically, and the gap between them is the actual decision you are making.

The band worth understanding properly is the relay minimum. That is not "slow" — it is the floor below which nodes decline to pass your transaction along at all. A wallet with a free-text fee field will happily let you go beneath it, and the result is a transaction that exists on your device and nowhere else.

Why the unit is per byte

Miners select transactions by how much they pay for the block space they occupy, not by how much they pay in absolute terms. Block space is what is scarce.

The consequence surprises people: a transaction with many inputs is large, and therefore expensive, regardless of the amount it moves. Consolidating a hundred small outputs costs considerably more than sending a single large payment, even though the second moves more money.

Virtual bytes rather than actual bytes because Segregated Witness discounts signature data. The practical effect is that modern address types — those beginning bc1 — produce smaller virtual sizes and cheaper transactions for the same activity.

The one thing worth doing with this page

If your wallet has accumulated many small payments, watch this page for a quiet period and consolidate them then. It converts a future expensive transaction into a cheap one now, and the difference over a busy period can be substantial.

That is close to the only fee-related action that is genuinely worth planning. Everything else — paying the rate your wallet suggests, bumping a stuck transaction with replace-by-fee — happens at the moment you need it.

If something is already stuck, our guide on unconfirmed transactions separates the five causes and covers which ones have a fix. Our mempool.space review explains the projected-block view, which is the clearest way to see where a specific transaction sits in the queue.

What actually drives the number

Bitcoin produces a block roughly every ten minutes and each block has a hard limit on how much it can contain. Demand for that space varies enormously and supply does not vary at all, so the price of inclusion is set by an auction that runs continuously.

When demand is low, almost anything clears and the bands above collapse towards the relay minimum. When demand is high — a surge of inscriptions, a market event, an exchange consolidating outputs — the bands spread and transactions that looked adequately priced an hour earlier get left behind.

There is no mechanism that raises your fee automatically. A transaction is broadcast with the rate you set and it keeps that rate until you replace it or it is dropped. That asymmetry is why replace-by-fee exists and why it is worth having enabled before you need it.

It is also why fee estimation is genuinely hard. An estimate is a projection about what other people will do next, and nobody can see the transactions that have not been broadcast yet. The bands above are a good projection and they are not a promise.

Reading the backlog

The mempool backlog figure is the count of valid transactions that have been broadcast and not yet confirmed. It is the most direct measure of competition for the next block.

A small backlog means almost anything confirms quickly and paying above the economy rate buys nothing. A large one means the queue is deep and your position in it is determined entirely by your fee rate relative to everyone else waiting.

The size figure alongside it matters more than the count, because block space is measured in bytes rather than transactions. A backlog of fifty thousand small transactions clears faster than one of ten thousand large ones. That is also why a transaction spending many inputs costs more: it occupies more of the scarce resource regardless of how little value it moves.

Why the difficulty figure is here

Bitcoin retargets its mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks — roughly a fortnight — so that blocks keep arriving about every ten minutes regardless of how much hash rate is pointed at the network.

A positive projected change means blocks have been arriving faster than ten minutes on average, which generally means more hash rate has joined. A negative one means the opposite. It is a measure of mining participation, not of price, and it has no bearing on what your transaction will cost.

We include it because it explains an otherwise puzzling observation: during a period when difficulty is adjusting upward, blocks have been arriving quickly, which means the mempool has been clearing faster than usual and fees have probably been soft. It is context for the bands rather than an input to them.

What this page will not tell you

It will not tell you where a specific transaction sits in the queue. For that you need the projected-block view on mempool.space, which shows the boundary your rate has to clear.

It will not tell you whether to use replace-by-fee or child-pays-for-parent on a stuck transaction. Our guide on unconfirmed transactions separates the five causes and covers which ones have a fix available to you.

And it will not help on any chain other than Bitcoin. Litecoin has its own fee market, considerably quieter, served by the same software at litecoinspace.org. Ethereum works on an entirely different model with an algorithmic base fee that is burned rather than paid. Fee intuitions do not transfer between chains, and assuming they do is a reliable way to overpay.

Address type changes what you pay

Segregated Witness moved signature data into a separate part of the transaction and gave it a discount when block space is measured. The unit that resulted, the virtual byte, is why fee rates are quoted in sat/vB rather than in bytes.

The practical consequence is that the address format you use changes your costs permanently. A wallet spending from modern bech32 addresses — those beginning bc1 — produces smaller virtual sizes than one spending from legacy addresses beginning 1, for exactly the same activity. Over many transactions the difference is substantial.

If your wallet still gives you addresses starting with 1, it is worth finding out whether it supports newer formats. This is not an urgent security matter and it is a standing tax on everything you do.

Taproot addresses, beginning bc1p, extend the same idea further for certain spending patterns. For an ordinary single-signature wallet the saving over bech32 is modest; for multisig it can be considerable, because Taproot lets a cooperative spend look like a single signature.

When the answer is not a fee at all

For small, frequent payments the correct response to high on-chain fees is often to avoid them entirely.

The Lightning Network settles payments off-chain and only touches the base layer when a channel opens or closes, which makes the per-payment cost negligible regardless of what the mempool is doing. It is a different set of trade-offs — liquidity, channel management, being online to receive — and it is the reason a coffee shop accepting Bitcoin is not waiting for blocks.

A block explorer cannot show you a Lightning payment, because there is nothing on the chain to show until a channel settles. That is worth knowing if someone tells you they have paid you over Lightning and you go looking for a transaction hash: the absence is expected, not evidence of anything.

mempool.space shows aggregate Lightning network statistics — channel counts and capacity — which is about as close as an on-chain explorer gets to the second layer.