What is hashprice, and what does it mean for my miner?

Bitcoin fell 26% in a year, and every petahash of mining power earned 7.3% more of it. Hashprice explains why, and a few steps of arithmetic turn it into what your own machine mines and what each BTC costs you to make.

Bitcoin fell. Miners got more of it

On 29 September 2025 one petahash per second of mining power earned 0.0004441 bitcoin a day. On 29 September 2026 it earned 0.00047647. That is 7.3% more bitcoin from the same hashing power, in a year when the bitcoin price fell 26%, from $112,880 to $83,471.

Both things happened because of how mining pays. When the price falls, miners with expensive power switch off. The network then makes the puzzle easier so blocks keep coming every ten minutes, and the same daily pot of new bitcoin is shared among fewer machines. Difficulty fell 6.7% over the year, and every machine still running took a bigger slice.

Measured in dollars, the daily earnings of a petahash fell 21%, from $50.13 to $39.77. Measured in the BTC miners are actually paid in, they rose. For anyone who mines to hold bitcoin, the second number is the one that counts.

Bitcoin fell 26%. Each petahash mined 7.3% more of it.

Hashprice is what one unit of hashing earns in a day

A bitcoin miner sells one thing: hashes, guesses at the puzzle that decides who writes the next block. The network pays for them in bitcoin, and hashprice is the price of that work. It is what one unit of hashing power earned in one day.

The unit is usually a petahash per second, a thousand terahashes, for one day. On 29 September 2026 that came to $39.77 per petahash per day on our hashprice chart, or 0.00047647 bitcoin. Scaled down to the terahash, the unit machines are sold in, it is 47.6 satoshis per terahash per day.

Nobody sets it for your machine. The network pays out about 450 new bitcoin a day in block rewards, plus the fees in each block, and that pot is shared out across all the hashing power competing for it. Divide the pot by the hashing power and you have hashprice. A newer, faster machine gets more of the pot because it brings more terahashes, not because each one is worth more.

Every terahash on earth earns the same amount on the same day. Only the electricity bill differs.

Chart: Hashprice in dollars per petahash per day through 2026: $41.64 on 15 January, $27.74 on 6 June, $41.31 on 22 September. Open the chart

What your own machine mines

Once you know hashprice, your machine's daily output is one step away. Multiply the machine's hashrate by hashprice, remembering that a petahash is a thousand terahashes.

Take an Antminer S21 XP rated at 270 terahashes per second. That is 0.27 petahash. At 0.00047647 bitcoin per petahash it mines about 12,865 satoshis a day, worth about $10.74 at $39.77. A 600-terahash machine mines 2.2 times as much, because it brings 2.2 times the hashing power.

If you mine through a pool, which almost every machine does, the pool pays each miner in proportion to the work they contributed, so luck does not come into the daily figure. What a mining pool is explains how the payments arrive.

Four things move it

The price of bitcoin. Hashprice is quoted in dollars but paid in bitcoin, so the price moves the dollar figure most. Between 6 June and 22 September 2026 bitcoin rose 42%, from $60,771 to $86,608, and hashprice rose 49%, from $27.74 to $41.31. The BTC one petahash earned rose too, from 0.00045647 to 0.00047694. Over the full year the price fell and the BTC per petahash still rose 7.3%.

Difficulty. The network adjusts how hard the puzzle is every 2,016 blocks, about every two weeks, so that blocks keep arriving roughly every ten minutes. When higher-cost machines switch off, difficulty falls and each remaining petahash earns a bigger slice of the same pot. Over the past year it fell 6.7%, from 142.3 trillion on 29 September 2025 to 132.8 trillion. You can follow it on the difficulty chart.

Fees. People pay a fee to have their transactions included, and miners keep it on top of the block reward. In 2026 fees are a small part of the pot: on 28 September they came to 3.4 bitcoin against about 450 in block rewards, under 1%. Why they are so low this year is in Bitcoin's busiest year is paying its miners the least in a decade.

The halving. Every 210,000 blocks, about four years, the block reward halves. It went from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoin on 20 April 2024, and the next halving is expected around April 2028. It is the one change every miner can see years ahead, which is why efficient machines on cheap power are the ones built to mine through it. Efficiency decides how many halvings a machine survives covers what that means for choosing a machine.

Chart: Hashprice with the bitcoin price overlaid since May 2026. Open the chart

What a bitcoin costs you to make

The other half of the picture is the electricity, and it comes from two numbers on the machine's spec sheet: joules per terahash, written J/TH, and the price of a kilowatt-hour where it runs.

First take the machine's J/TH. The S21 XP is rated at 13.5. Second, multiply it by 0.024, which turns joules per second into kilowatt-hours per day: 0.324 kilowatt-hours per terahash per day. Third, multiply by the price of a kilowatt-hour. At our Argentina site that is 6¢, which makes 1.94¢ per terahash per day. Fourth, multiply by 1,000 to get the cost of a petahash-day, the same unit as hashprice: $19.44.

Divide that by the bitcoin a petahash mines and you have the electricity cost of one bitcoin: $19.44 ÷ 0.00047647 is about $40,800, with bitcoin trading at $83,471. A year earlier the same machine on the same power spent about $43,770 per bitcoin, so one BTC got cheaper to make while the price fell. On our Nigeria site, where power is 3.9¢, the same machine's power cost works out to about $26,500 per bitcoin. Current rates for every site are on the sites page.

Measured that way, a miner on cheap power is producing bitcoin at a fraction of what it costs to buy, and producing more of it each month while the network shakes out higher-cost machines.

A 13.5 J/TH machine on 6¢ power made bitcoin for about $40,800 in electricity, with the BTC at $83,471.

The cost line does not move when the price does

The useful habit is to keep the two numbers apart. Hashprice moves every day with the bitcoin price and the network. A machine's power cost per petahash does not move at all, because efficiency and the power rate are fixed. It is a single number you can write down before you buy.

This year shows how wide hashprice swings. Across the 271 days of 2026 for which we hold complete data, it ranged from $27.74 on 6 June to $41.64 on 15 January. A 13.5 J/TH machine at 6¢ has a line of $19.44, and hashprice stayed above it on every one of those days, through the year's lowest point included.

An old machine at 30 J/TH on the same power has a line of $43.20, above hashprice on every one of those days. On 3.9¢ power its line is $28.08. Efficiency and cheap power are what keep a machine mining through the low points, and the low points are when it gains the most ground in BTC.

Hashprice is the weather. J/TH and the power rate are the building.

What it means for a miner

For a first-time buyer, hashprice is the number to check against a machine's line, before the machine is bought. Find the J/TH, find the power rate, work out the line, and set it beside today's hashprice on the hashprice chart. The wider the gap, the more room the machine has through a lower bitcoin price or a difficulty rise.

A falling bitcoin price is not the same thing as a falling mining business. Over the past year the price fell 26% and an efficient machine on cheap power mined more BTC, each for less electricity. Because the BTC you mine are yours to keep, a machine that clears its line adds to a stack you still hold whatever the price does next month. Nobody sells the BTC to pay the power bill explains how that works in practice.

Mining output depends on bitcoin's price, difficulty and uptime, and isn't guaranteed.

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.