How much electricity a bitcoin miner uses, and how the power price decides if it makes money

A bitcoin miner is a machine that turns electricity into coins, and the price of that electricity is the one cost you can fix in advance. Here is how to work out what a machine draws and what that costs a day, with the arithmetic done for you at three power prices.

A miner is a heater that pays you in bitcoin

Every watt a mining machine draws from the wall ends up as heat, and the machine's whole job is to turn that electricity into guesses at the puzzle that earns bitcoin. It does no other work. A machine that guesses twice as fast for the same power is twice as good; a machine that draws twice the power for the same guesses is twice as costly to run.

The spec sheet gives the draw in watts. A common air-cooled machine today is rated around 3,000 watts, which is 3 kilowatts. For scale, a 3 kW electric kettle drawing its full power for as long as it is switched on is the same load. A miner never switches off: it runs all day and all night, which is why its power bill is the number that matters most. The spec sheet guide shows where to find the figure on the machine you are looking at.

A kilowatt-hour is one kilowatt for one hour

Electricity is sold by the kilowatt-hour, written kWh. It is the energy used by a 1 kW load running for one hour. A 3 kW machine uses 3 kWh every hour, so in a day it uses 3 multiplied by 24, which is 72 kWh. In a 30-day month that is 2,160 kWh, and in a year about 26,280 kWh.

That figure is the same wherever the machine sits. What changes from place to place is the price of each kilowatt-hour, which is quoted in cents, and that is the only thing that moves the bill. Our sites quote theirs in the same way: 3.9¢ per kWh in Nigeria and 6¢ in Argentina and the UAE, as of 5 October 2026.

The same 72 kWh a day. Only the price of each one changes.

Multiply by the rate and you have the bill

At 6¢ a kilowatt-hour, 72 kWh a day costs $4.32. That is $129.60 for a 30-day month and about $1,577 for a year. At Nigeria's 3.9¢ the same machine costs $2.81 a day, $84.24 a month and about $1,025 a year. At 7.5¢, which our cost to mine chart uses as a normal industrial rate almost anywhere else, it is $5.40 a day and $162 a month.

Nothing else in the sum changes. The machine draws the same power, the day has the same hours, and the only difference between $2.81 and $5.40 is where the plug is. Over a four-year life the gap between the cheapest and the dearest of those rates is several thousand dollars on one machine, and the machine is the same.

The machine earns more than that, until it does not

Power is one side of the sum. The other is what the machine earns, and the cleanest way to see that is hashprice, the dollars a unit of mining power earns in a day, covered in our hashprice guide. Hashprice was $40.38 per petahash per day on 4 October 2026 on our hashprice chart. A petahash is a thousand terahashes, so one terahash earns about 4 cents a day.

Take a machine that does 200 terahashes and draws 3,000 watts, which is 15 joules per terahash. It earns about 200 times 4 cents, which is $8.08 a day, before anything else. After power at 3.9¢ it keeps $5.27 a day, which is 65% of what it earns. At 6¢ it keeps $3.76, 47%. At 7.5¢ it keeps $2.68, 33%. The machine is the same and the earnings are the same, and the electricity decides how much of them stays.

There is a rate at which the machine keeps nothing: the break-even rate. Divide the day's earnings by the day's kilowatt-hours and you have it. $8.08 divided by 72 kWh is 11.2¢. Above 11.2¢ a kilowatt-hour, at today's hashprice, this machine costs more to run than it earns. Below it, every cent of difference is margin.

Chart: The power price, in cents per kWh, at which each class of machine stops covering its electricity. The dashed levels are our own rates. The gap between a line and the rate you pay is the machine's margin. Open the chart

A more efficient machine has a higher break-even rate

Now take a machine that also does 200 terahashes but draws 1,800 watts, which is 9 joules per terahash. It uses 43.2 kWh a day. At 6¢ that is $2.59 a day, against $4.32 for the first one, for the same $8.08 of earnings. Its break-even rate today is 18.7¢, not 11.2¢.

That higher line is what efficiency buys. Efficiency is the number on the spec sheet written as J/TH, the watts for each terahash, and the lower it is, the further a machine can sit from the break-even line. It matters most when earnings fall. The next halving, in April 2028, halves the coins every machine earns, and at an unchanged price and difficulty that would cut hashprice to about $20.19. The 15 J/TH machine's break-even rate would then be 5.6¢, below 6¢, so at 6¢ it would be losing money. The 9 J/TH machine's would be 9.3¢, and it would still be earning. That is why efficiency decides how many halvings a machine survives.

Bitcoin moves every day. The power price does not

The rate on a power contract is a price in dollars, written down in advance. It does not move when bitcoin moves. What the machine earns is a share of the network's daily rewards, valued at the bitcoin price of the day, so it moves with the price, with the network's size and with what you are paid in fees.

That is why the rate is the number to look at first. You cannot change the price of bitcoin, or how many other machines join the network. You can choose where a machine runs. The same machine at 3.9¢ has a break-even rate nearly three times what it pays, and at 11¢ it has almost no margin left. It is also why a coin's cost is told in electricity: the cost per coin is the electricity that made it, and it is the one figure that does not depend on what you paid for the machine.

Chart: The electricity behind one mined bitcoin on the same 13.5 J/TH machine at three power prices. The coins are identical; only the rate changes the cost. Open the chart

Three things that change the real bill

The sums above assume the machine runs all day at its rated draw. Three things move the real figure. The first is uptime. A machine that is switched off uses no electricity and earns no coins, so a day offline removes both sides of the sum, and what a day offline costs is the coins it did not mine.

The second is cooling. Air-cooled, water-cooled and immersion machines have different rooms around them, and a host's rate may or may not include the fans, pumps and cooling plant. Ask. The third is what the rate covers. A quoted price per kilowatt-hour can be for the machine's draw alone or can carry other charges on top, and the only comparison that means anything is between all-in rates for the same machine.

What to ask about electricity before you choose a site

Four questions are enough. What is the price per kilowatt-hour, in cents, and is it the whole price or a part of it? Is it fixed, and for how long? What does the site's uptime look like over the last two years, because a cheap rate on a machine that is often off is worth less than it looks? And where does the machine sit on the break-even line at that rate, at today's hashprice and at half of it?

The hosting guide walks the whole process from checkout to first payout and says where this bill appears in it.

What it means for a miner

Electricity is the only recurring cost of mining, and it is the one a miner who keeps the coins can plan around. The most efficient machine in stock on our cheapest power makes a coin for about $18,000 of electricity, against a market price near $86,500, as of 5 October 2026. That is a gap of nearly five to one, and it is made entirely of the two things in this guide: the watts a terahash takes and the price of each kilowatt-hour.

Do the sum for any machine before you buy it: watts, times 24, times the rate, against the day's earnings. If it works at today's hashprice and still works at half of it, the machine can carry itself. Output is never guaranteed, and the earnings side of the sum is the one that moves.

The machine decides how much power each coin takes. The rate decides what that power costs.

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.