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Guide · Oct 20, 2026 · 6 min read

Where does the bitcoin a miner earns come from? New coins and fees, and how small the fees are

Every block pays its miner twice: in brand-new coins, and in the fees people attached to their payments. Today almost all of it is new coins. Fees were about 0.6% of what miners earned over the last 30 days, and here is how to see that for yourself.

Firsthand card: "Where does the bitcoin a miner earns come from? New coins and fees, and how small the fees are", 0.6% from fees over the 30 days to 14 October 2026, and the line of fees as a share of the block reward over the last year

TL;DR

Short answer: almost all of it is new coins

When your machine's pool pays you, the bitcoin comes from two places. The larger one is new coins that the network creates and hands to whoever wins each block. The smaller one is fees: small amounts that people pay to have their own bitcoin payments included in that block.

In the 30 days to 14 October 2026 the network mined 4,443 blocks. They paid miners 13,884 coins of new bitcoin and 89 coins of fees. Fees were about 0.6% of the total. The rest of this guide shows where each part comes from, so you can read your own machine's income with the right picture in your head.

If you want the wider picture of what a miner does with its day first, start with what a bitcoin miner is and what it actually does all day.

Every block pays its miner twice

A block is a batch of bitcoin payments, closed about every ten minutes. The first entry in every block is a special one that pays the miner who found it. The Bitcoin developer guide describes it as collecting "the block reward (comprised of a block subsidy and any transaction fees paid by transactions included in this block)".

So the reward has two parts, and each has its own name. The subsidy is the new bitcoin. The fees are what the senders of the payments in that block paid. A miner who wins the block keeps both, and a pool shares both between the machines that helped.

A block pays a fixed amount of new coins, plus whatever fees the payments inside it brought.

The new coins are set by the rules, not by anyone's choice

Today the subsidy is 3.125 bitcoin per block. That number is written into the rules every bitcoin node enforces, and no miner can award itself more. It is cut in half at each halving, which is why it was 6.25 before the last one in April 2024 and will be 1.5625 after the next, due in April 2028.

At 3.125 coins and about 148 blocks a day, the network created roughly 460 new bitcoin a day over the 30 days to 14 October. That fixed pot is what a machine's hashrate is competing for. What the halving is, and what it does to a machine's earnings goes through the day it changes.

Fees are what people pay to be in the next block

A block has limited room, so payments queue for it. The developer guide on transactions says that fees are based on the size of the payment in bytes, that "fees per byte are calculated based on current demand for space in mined blocks", and that "all transactions are prioritized based on their fee per byte". A sender who pays more is placed ahead of one who pays less, and the miner collects the difference between what went into the payment and what came out.

That makes fees a measure of how busy the network is. When many people want to send bitcoin at once, fees rise. When the queue is short, they fall to almost nothing. Nothing about it is under a miner's control, and no machine can mine more fees by being faster.

Today's split, worked out from the numbers

Take the 30 days to 14 October 2026, the latest day our fee series covers. Fees across those days added up to 88.6 bitcoin, against 13,884 bitcoin of new coins. That is 0.63% fees and 99.37% new coins.

Per block, the picture is the same. The average block carried about 0.02 bitcoin of fees, around $1,660 at the $83,094 bitcoin closed at on 14 October. The new coins in that same block were worth about $259,700. Over the last 365 days the fee share ran between 0.3% and 1.4% on any single day, and over 2026 to date it is 0.63%.

The chart shows fees in bitcoin and, as the overlay, their share of the total miners earned. Fees spike on a few busy days and sit close to the floor for the rest.

Chart: Fees paid to miners each day, in bitcoin, with the fee share of total miner revenue overlaid. Look at the late-April 2024 spike, then at how flat the line has been since. Open the chart

Fees have been much bigger, on a few days

Fees were not always this small. On 20 April 2024, the day of the last halving, fees reached 1,258 bitcoin against about 406 bitcoin of new coins, which is 76% of the day's total. That is the highest daily share in our series, which starts in 2013. It was one day: the next day, 21 April, the share was 44%.

The most bitcoin paid in fees in one day in our record was 1,496 bitcoin on 22 December 2017, when the new coins were 12.5 per block and fees were 44% of the day. Calendar years in our series show the same pattern: 12.6% in 2017, about 6% in 2021, 2023 and 2024, then about 0.6% for 2026 so far.

Fees can therefore jump when the network gets busy. They have been quiet this year. Our piece on bitcoin's busiest year paying its miners the least in a decade looks at why.

On 20 April 2024, the day of the last halving, fees were 76% of what the day's blocks paid.

What this means for one machine, in sats

Take a machine that makes 270 TH/s, which is 0.27 petahash. Hashprice, the number of coins one petahash earns in a day, was 0.000476 bitcoin on 14 October. That machine's share of the day was about 0.000129 bitcoin, or 12,854 sats. What hashprice is, and what it means for your miner explains the figure.

Of those 12,854 sats, fees were about 81, at the 0.63% share. At $83,094 that is about seven US cents a day. The other 12,773 sats, about $10.61, came from new coins. Hashprice already includes both, so you never add the fees on top: they are inside the number.

Output depends on price, difficulty and the hashrate your machine really delivers, and it is not guaranteed. The point of the sum is the proportion: a machine's income today is new coins.

Check it yourself in three steps

Step 1: open the fees page in our Data section and read the latest daily figure in bitcoin. It is usually a few coins.

Step 2: multiply the current subsidy, 3.125, by about 144 blocks a day. That is roughly 450 coins. Divide the day's fees by that total plus the fees. If the answer is a percent or two, you are reading the normal state of the network.

Step 3: next time a headline says fees have jumped, run the sum again before reading anything into it. A spike that takes the share from 0.6% to 3% still leaves 97% of the income as new coins.

What it means for a miner

Your machine is paid almost entirely in new coins, and the number of new coins halves in April 2028. If fees stayed at the size they were over the 30 days to 14 October, the fee share would roughly double at that halving, from 0.63% to about 1.3%. It stays small, which is why the sound way to judge a machine is by its efficiency and the power rate it runs on, not by hoping for a fee rush.

That is the number we put first on every machine page: what a coin costs 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 $81,710 to buy one. That is electricity only, before the machine and the pool fee. Output depends on price, difficulty and uptime, and is not guaranteed. Nothing here is investment advice.

Sources and further reading

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.