Guide · Oct 24, 2026 · 6 min read
How many bitcoin are left to mine, and when will the last one be found?
There will never be more than 21 million bitcoin, and about 95.7% of them already exist. Here is how to work out how many are left, why the last ones take more than a century to find, and what a smaller prize means for a machine you buy today.
The total is fixed at just under 21 million
Bitcoin's software allows a total of slightly under 21 million coins, ever. The exact limit is 20,999,999.9769 bitcoin, a rounding quirk of how the software stores amounts, according to the Bitcoin Wiki. No company, miner or owner can raise it, because every computer that checks the bitcoin network enforces the same rule.
That fixed limit is why a miner's job is described as finding coins rather than making them. The coins already exist in the rules; mining is the process that releases them, a few at a time, to whoever finds the next block.
Step one: count how many exist today
Our bitcoin supply chart counts every coin mined so far. On 23 October 2026 the figure was 20,102,398 bitcoin. Subtract that from 21 million and 897,602 are left to be mined, which is 4.3% of the total. Put the other way round, 95.7% of all the bitcoin there will ever be has already been released.
It is a count of coins that have been created, not of coins that can be spent. Some coins were sent to addresses nobody can open, and some are lost with forgotten keys. The software still counts them as mined, so the "left to mine" figure above does not change because of them.
Step two: see how fast new ones arrive
A new batch of bitcoin is released in every block, and the network is set up to find one block about every ten minutes. Today each block pays 3.125 new bitcoin to the miner who finds it. That is 144 blocks a day, so about 450 new bitcoin a day, or roughly 164,000 a year.
Real days are not that tidy. Our blocks-per-day chart shows between 128 and 174 blocks a day in the week to 23 October. Every two weeks or so the network resets its difficulty so that the average comes back to ten minutes, which is why the schedule stays close to the clock. The guide to difficulty explains how.
Step three: do not divide, because the reward keeps halving
The obvious sum is 897,602 divided by 450, which is about 1,995 days, or five and a half years. It is wrong, because the reward per block is cut in half every 210,000 blocks, about every four years. That event is the halving. The guide to the halving covers what it does to a machine's earnings.
The table below follows the schedule forward. Each row is one four-year stretch, at the reward that applies in it. The dates are approximate, because four years is an average, not a promise.
At today's pace the last 897,602 would take about five and a half years. They will take more than a hundred.
| Stretch (approx.) | Reward per block | Bitcoin released in it | Total released by the end | Share of the limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 to 2028 | 3.125 | 656,250 | 20,343,750 | 96.9% |
| 2028 to 2032 | 1.5625 | 328,125 | 20,671,875 | 98.4% |
| 2032 to 2036 | 0.78125 | 164,063 | 20,835,938 | 99.2% |
| 2036 to 2040 | 0.390625 | 82,031 | 20,917,969 | 99.6% |
| 2040 to 2044 | 0.1953125 | 41,016 | 20,958,984 | 99.8% |
The next halving leaves 656,250
The next halving is at block 1,050,000. Our chain tip on 23 October was block 972,821, so 77,179 blocks remain, and at 3.125 each they will release another 241,184 bitcoin. That is why the first row of the table ends at 20,343,750.
After that halving, the reward falls to 1.5625 and only 656,250 bitcoin will remain to be mined: 3.1% of the total. At 144 blocks a day the halving falls around April 2028, and our halving page keeps the live count of blocks to go.
A shortcut you can check yourself
There is a quick way to test any of these figures. Each stretch releases half as much as the one before, so everything still to come after a halving is twice what the next stretch releases. After the 2028 halving the reward is 1.5625 bitcoin for 210,000 blocks, which releases 328,125. Double it and you get 656,250, the figure above. The same trick works at every halving, all the way down.
To redo the whole calculation in three minutes, open the supply chart for the count of coins released, open the halving page for the blocks to go, and multiply the blocks by the current reward. Then add twice the next stretch's release. If the answer plus today's supply comes to just under 21 million, you have it right.
Why the last coin takes until about 2140
The reward is stored in the smallest unit of bitcoin, one hundred-millionth of a coin, called a satoshi, and each halving shifts the number down by one binary place. After 32 halvings the reward is a single satoshi, and after the 33rd it is nothing. Counting 210,000 blocks for each of those 33 stretches puts the end of new coins at block 6,930,000.
At ten minutes a block that is about 132 years after the first block in January 2009. The Bitcoin Wiki gives 7 May 2140 as the date if block times stayed constant, and notes that the real date depends on how mining power changes. The practical point is that more than 99% of all bitcoin is released by about 2040, and the last century of mining releases the final two-tenths of a percent.
What miners are paid when the new coins thin out
A miner is paid in two ways: the new coins in the block, called the subsidy, and the fees that people attach to their transactions. Today fees are small. In the seven days to 23 October they averaged 2.43 bitcoin a day, about half of one per cent of the 450 coins released by the subsidy. The guide on where a miner's bitcoin comes from breaks the two apart.
Each halving makes fees a larger share of the pay without changing their size. The Bitcoin Wiki states the endpoint plainly: when issuance reaches zero, fees are all that miners earn. That is a century away, and the shift is gradual: after the 2028 halving the subsidy is 225 coins a day, and fees at today's level would be about one per cent of it.
What it means for the machine you buy now
A machine bought today will be working through the 2028 halving, and a machine at a good efficiency will still be earning after it. The guide on efficiency and halvings explains why the joules per terahash on the spec sheet decide how many halvings it survives, and the guide to how long a miner lasts covers the rest of its working life.
The yearly release is the number to keep in mind. It is about 164,250 bitcoin a year today, 82,125 after the 2028 halving and 41,063 after the one around 2032. A machine with the same share of the network earns half as many coins after each halving unless the network shrinks, which is why a machine is judged on how long it stays worth switching on, and why efficiency is the number that matters most at the start.
Two facts follow from the schedule. The pot a machine shares is fixed in size and shrinks in steps, so its share of the network's hashing power sets how many coins it earns, and a more efficient machine keeps more of them after the power bill. And the coins you mine are the scarce part: only 897,602 more will ever exist, and about 164,000 of those arrive in the next twelve months, shared among every miner on the network. How many coins a machine earns is never guaranteed, because it depends on difficulty and on the rest of the network, but the schedule itself does not change.
Sources and further reading
- Controlled supply — Bitcoin Wiki, Page last edited 15 Apr 2026
- Bitcoin supply, daily, 13 years of bitcoin data — Firsthand data, 23 Oct 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.