Firsthand Bitcoin · Data · Bitcoin miners

Difficulty adjustments

The size of every bitcoin difficulty retarget, as a percentage.

+5.54% on Oct 29, 2026.

Each bar is one retarget. Most are small and upward, because hashrate keeps growing. The large negative ones mark the moments miners switched off in numbers: China’s mining ban in mid-2021 produced the biggest cut in bitcoin’s history, −28%.

A downward adjustment is a pay rise for every machine still running, which is part of why the network corrects itself.

Difficulty adjustment, month by month

MonthDifficulty adjustment
Nov 2025-1.95%
Dec 2025+0.04%
Jan 2026-3.28%
Feb 2026+14.73%
Mar 2026-7.76%
Apr 2026-2.43%
May 2026+1.72%
Jun 2026+7.15%
Jul 2026-0.74%
Aug 2026-1.31%
Sep 2026+4.16%
Oct 2026+5.54%

Questions

What is difficulty adjustments today?
+5.54% as of October 29, 2026.
How has it changed over the past year?
A year ago it was +6.31%; today it is +5.54%, a change of -12.2%.
How is this chart calculated?
Each bar is one retarget. Most are small and upward, because hashrate keeps growing. The large negative ones mark the moments miners switched off in numbers: China’s mining ban in mid-2021 produced the biggest cut in bitcoin’s history, −28%.

By year

2026 · 2025 · 2024 · 2023 · 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018 · 2017 · 2016 · 2015 · 2014 · 2013

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Updated daily. Latest data 2026-11-06.

Network hashrate · Mining difficulty · Fees paid to miners · Transactions per day · Mempool · Active addresses · UTXO set · Block size and transactions per block · Blocks mined per day · Median confirmation time · Blockchain size · Miner revenue per transaction