Guide · Oct 10, 2026 · 6 min read
How long does a bitcoin miner take to pay for itself? A four-step sum you can do yourself
Payback is the one question every first-time buyer asks, and the answer is four numbers and a division: what you paid, what the machine earns in a day, what the electricity costs, and what is left. Here is the sum, worked on a real machine at today’s figures.
Payback is days of profit added up until they equal the price
A bitcoin miner is a machine that earns every day it is switched on, and costs you electricity every day it is on. What is left after the electricity is the daily profit. Payback is how many of those days it takes for the profit to add up to what you paid for the machine.
That is the whole idea. If a machine cost $5,000 and makes $10 a day after electricity, it pays for itself in 500 days. The rest of this guide is how to find the three numbers behind that sum for a machine you are looking at, in the order you find them.
One note on words. You do not have to sell any bitcoin for this to work. The machine’s coins are counted at today’s price when we do the sum, and you can keep every one of them. Payback tells you when the machine has earned back its price, not when you must cash in.
Step 1: the price is the all-in price, not the price of the box
The first number is what you actually pay to have the machine running. That is the machine, the freight, the import duty, customs, setup and a deposit of electricity paid in advance. The price of a miner is not the price of the box goes through each line.
For our worked example we use the Bitmain Antminer S21e XP Hyd, a water-cooled machine that does 430 TH/s at 13 J/TH. As of 10 October 2026 its all-in price to run it at our UAE site is $5,855, on its machine page. At Nigeria it is $6,552, because the extras that come with sending a machine there are higher.
Step 2: what the machine earns in a day comes from hashprice
The second number is the day’s income. You do not have to guess it, because the network publishes it. It is called hashprice: what one petahash, a thousand terahashes, earns in a day. What hashprice is has the long version. On 9 October it was $38.94 on our hashprice chart.
Multiply it by the machine’s size. The S21e XP Hyd is 0.43 petahash, and a site is not on every minute of the day, so after a little downtime it earns about 0.000203 bitcoin a day in the UAE. At today’s price of $82,562 that is about $16.80 a day.
Step 3: the electricity is the machine’s power draw times the rate
The third number is what keeping it on costs. A machine’s power draw is on its spec sheet, in kilowatts, and the spec sheet guide shows where. Electricity is billed per kilowatt-hour, and a day is 24 of them, so the machine’s cost is its draw times 24 times the site’s rate. How much electricity a miner uses works it through.
The UAE site charges 6¢ a kilowatt-hour, and the S21e XP Hyd, with its water pump, comes to about $8.70 a day. At Nigeria’s 3.9¢ it is about $4.20, but the site is on less of the time, so the machine also earns less, and the profit comes out almost the same.
Step 4: divide the price by the daily profit
Income of $16.80 less electricity of $8.70 leaves about $8.12 a day in the UAE. Divide the all-in price by it: $5,855 ÷ $8.12 is about 720 days, a little under two years. At Nigeria the profit is about $8.28 a day, and $6,552 ÷ $8.28 is about 790 days, a little over two.
That is a payback on today’s conditions held flat. It is the right first answer and it is not a promise, because three of the numbers change.
$5,855 divided by about $8.12 a day is about 720 days, or two years.
Three things move the answer, and one of them is a date
The first is the bitcoin price. The machine earns coins, and what the coins are worth moves. A higher price shortens payback and a lower one stretches it. Because you can keep the coins, a longer payback does not force a sale.
The second is difficulty, the network’s own setting for how hard a coin is to find. It usually rises as more machines join, which trims what each machine earns. What difficulty is explains how, and our difficulty page estimates the next change, in about seven days, at +3.4%.
The third is the halving. On 20 April 2028 the reward for each block is cut in half, and with it the coins a machine earns for the same electricity. From today that is about 558 days away. At today’s conditions held flat, the S21e XP Hyd’s profit by then adds up to about three-quarters of its all-in price, and the halving guide covers what comes after. Every forward figure we publish assumes bitcoin recovers its old high, so read payback as a range.
Run it twice, once per site, and keep the lower answer in mind
Two sites can give almost the same payback by different routes. In our example the UAE earns more a day and costs more to run, Nigeria earns less and costs less, and both land within a couple of months of each other. The sum is how you see that, instead of choosing on the electricity rate alone.
Then ask what would have to be true for the answer to stretch. In our example the profit up to April 2028, at today’s conditions held flat, covers about three-quarters of the all-in price, so the last quarter depends on what bitcoin does after the halving. That is not a reason to avoid the machine, but it is worth knowing before you pay.
Check the answer against the machine’s efficiency too. A lower J/TH means a smaller electricity line in the sum, which is why the efficient machines hold their payback best as hashprice falls. The efficiency and halvings guide shows by how much.
A real machine, three years in
Here is what the sum looks like once a machine has run. Our Antminer S19j Pro+ field report follows an older air-cooled machine bought in October 2023. It cost $2,403 landed, and in 1,081 days it has produced $3,679 of cashflow with its coins counted at today’s price: 1.5 times its landed cost. It got there by running through a halving and a hashprice trough without being switched off once.
The point of the sum is not a date. It is a way to compare two machines on the same footing before you buy, and to know which of the four numbers is doing the work.
What it means for a miner
Payback is a useful number and the wrong one to stop at. A machine that has paid for its box keeps earning, and the coins it mines are the ones you keep. The more useful figure over the long run is what a coin costs you to make. On today’s hashprice the most efficient machine in stock on our cheapest power, the Bitmain Antminer S23 XP Hyd at 8.9 J/TH in Nigeria at 3.9¢, makes a coin for about $17,900 of electricity, against $82,562 to buy one. That is electricity only, before the machine and the pool fee.
Do the four-step sum on any machine you are considering, once for each site, and read the answer as a range. Mining output depends on price, difficulty and uptime, and is not guaranteed. Nothing here is investment advice.
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.