Data insight · Sep 29, 2026 · 4 min read
Bitcoin's busiest year is paying its miners the least in a decade
The chain has averaged 578,000 transactions a day in 2026, more than any year before it, and the typical one pays about 41 cents. Fees are 0.6% of what miners earn, the lowest since 2015, and almost all of the rest is the subsidy that halves in 2028.
2026 is the busiest year bitcoin has had
Bitcoin's chain has confirmed an average of 578,012 transactions a day so far this year, from 1 January to 28 September. The previous busiest year was 2024, at 525,269, and 2023 was 420,318. Three of the five busiest days on record have come since 19 July: 898,862 that day, 893,391 on 6 September and 879,309 on 30 August, behind only 927,010 on 23 April 2024 and 910,083 on 8 September 2024.
Nothing about the network is quiet. The transactions chart is at the top of its range, and the busy days are not one-off spikes: the count has been above 500,000 on 183 of the 264 days.
That is the demand side of bitcoin, and it is real. The question for anyone who mines is what that demand pays, because the fee attached to each of those transactions is the only part of it that ends up with the miner.
Each of them pays almost nothing
The typical day of 2026 averaged 492 satoshis in fees per transaction. In 2025 it was 1,140, in 2024 4,019 and in 2023 7,825. At our 29 September price of $83,471, 492 satoshis is about 41 US cents.
Averaged over the 90 days to 20 September, a transaction paid 453 satoshis, the lowest 90-day figure anywhere in our data, which starts in 2013. Our fee estimates for 29 September put the fastest confirmation at 2 satoshis per virtual byte, and the economy rate at 1.
The typical transaction of 2026 paid about 41 cents, at today's price.
Fees were three-quarters of miner revenue on halving day. They are 0.6% now
On 20 April 2024, the day of the last halving, users paid 1,257.7 bitcoin in fees, 75% of that day's miner revenue and the highest share in our history. Across 2024 fees averaged 5.55% of what miners earned, and 5.84% in 2023.
In 2026 the share has averaged 0.60%, the lowest of any year since 2015, when it was 0.53%. April 2026 was the thinnest month at 0.53%, and September to date is 0.57%. Cointelegraph reported the same low in August, quoting Glassnode's Rafael Schultze-Kraft: "Bitcoin was below $400 the last time fee share was this low."
That day miners earned $107.8 million, the most in a single day anywhere in our data, which the miner revenue chart shows as a spike made almost entirely of fees. On 28 September fees came to 3.43 bitcoin, about $289,000 of the $48.6 million miners earned that day, less than half the halving-day total.
Fees come in waves, and this is the trough between them
Fees have never been steady. Averaged by year, they were 12.01% of miner revenue in 2017, 6.64% in 2020, 5.94% in 2021, 5.84% in 2023 and 5.55% in 2024, each wave driven by a rush for blockspace. Between the waves they fell back: 1.61% in 2022, 1.02% in 2025 and 0.60% in 2026.
The bitcoin paid out shows how deep this trough is. Users paid miners 23,432 bitcoin in fees in 2023 and 15,192 in 2024. In 2025 the total was about 1,700, and in 2026 through 28 September it is 750.
In dollars, the fee pool of 2026 has averaged $206,345 a day, against $2.52 million a day in 2024: about a twelfth. The fees chart shows the last wave, around the April 2024 halving, and the flat line that has followed it.
Getting back to 2024's share would take fees ten times higher
Fees do not need much to matter again, but they need far more than they pay now. At 578,012 transactions a day and a 450-bitcoin subsidy, a 5.55% fee share, the 2024 average, would mean about 26.4 bitcoin a day in fees, 9.3 times the 2026 average of 2.84. That works out at roughly 4,570 satoshis per transaction, which is where a typical day sat in 2024.
The blocks themselves are not idle. On 28 September the average block held 4,728 transactions, against a record of 5,518 on 23 April 2024, and the mempool chart counted 79,609 transactions waiting on 29 September. What is missing is the price: our estimate for the fastest confirmation on that day is 2 satoshis per virtual byte.
The subsidy is the pay cheque, and it halves in April 2028
Every day the network pays out 450 bitcoin in new coins, 3.125 a block over roughly 144 blocks, against the 2026 average of 2.84 bitcoin in fees. The subsidy is about 99% of the pot that every machine on the network shares. Of the $40.26 a petahash earned on 28 September on our hashprice chart, fees were about 24 cents.
At the next halving in April 2028 the subsidy drops to 1.5625 bitcoin a block, 225 a day. If fees stay at this year's pace they would then be about 1.25% of the pot, so what a machine earns will still be decided by the price of the coin and by how much of the network's hashrate the machine holds. See why efficiency decides how many halvings a machine survives.
That is the case for the miner who keeps the coins and buys the efficient machine, and it does not lean on fees. A fee wave like 2024's would lift every machine's hashprice, and it is upside on top of the plan rather than part of it. The miner revenue chart shows the split every day.
A quiet fee market is not a problem for a miner. It is a fact to plan around.
Sources and further reading
- Bitcoin miners earn under 0.7% of revenue from fees in new 10-year low — Cointelegraph, 12 Aug 2026
Disclosure
Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.