Glossary · Crypto
Transaction fee
A transaction fee is what you pay a blockchain’s miners or validators to include your payment in a block; on Ethereum it is called gas.
Also called: gas, gas fee, network fee, miner fee, sat/vB
Average of the 30 days to November 11, 2026: 2.65 BTC a day, about $1,355 a block.
The rest is new coins; the same 30 days.
The base part of every Ethereum fee is destroyed: about $9.54B at the latest price.
In plain words
A block has limited room: bitcoin’s holds a few thousand payments every 10 minutes. When more people want in than will fit, they bid for space. The bid is the transaction fee, and the miner who builds the block picks the best-paying payments first, like a taxi driver at surge time.
On bitcoin the fee depends on how much room your payment takes in the block, measured in bytes, not on how much money it moves: sending $10 or $10 million can cost the same. Wallets quote it in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB) and suggest a rate for fast or slow confirmation.
On Ethereum the fee is called gas and depends on how much computing the transaction needs. Since August 2021 the base part of every fee is burned rather than paid out: 4.65 million ETH so far.
Example
Two payments, one block
- Alice sends 2 BTC; her payment takes 140 virtual bytes. Bob sends 0.001 BTC from a wallet full of small coins; his takes 600 vB.
- The going rate is 5 sat/vB. Alice pays 140 × 5 = 700 sats; Bob pays 600 × 5 = 3,000 sats, more than four times as much for moving 2,000 times less money.
- At the latest price, 700 sats is about $0.52 and 3,000 sats about $2.21.
- If a rush lifts the rate to 100 sat/vB, the same payments cost 14,000 and 60,000 sats: twenty times more.
Fees follow the demand for block space, not the size of the payment.
One level deeper
Fees are the second part of miners’ income, after new coins. Over the last 30 days they made up 0.6% of it, about $209K a day. As each halving cuts the new coins, fees will have to carry more of the cost of securing the network.
Fees spike when everyone wants in at once: in the December 2017 boom, in spring 2021, in late 2023 and on the April 2024 halving day, when a rush to create new tokens on bitcoin made fees 75% of everything miners earned that day. The most paid in fees on a single day so far was $78.3M, on April 20, 2024.
On Ethereum the fee is the gas used × (base fee + tip). The base fee rises automatically when blocks are more than half full and falls when they are emptier, and it is burned; the tip goes to the validator. Many users now pay far less on layer-2 networks, which bundle thousands of transactions into one on Ethereum.
Fees as a share of what bitcoin miners earn
Each month’s fees as a percent of miners’ total income, fees plus new coins. The peak month was December 2017, at 24%. In 78% of the months since 2013 fees were less than 5% of the total.
The numbers behind the chart
| Date | Fees, % of miners’ income |
|---|---|
| Jan 2013 | 1.2% |
| Dec 2013 | 0.4% |
| Dec 2014 | 0.4% |
| Dec 2015 | 0.8% |
| Dec 2016 | 4.9% |
| Dec 2017 | 23.7% |
| Dec 2018 | 1.3% |
| Dec 2019 | 1.1% |
| Dec 2020 | 9.9% |
| Dec 2021 | 1.4% |
| Dec 2022 | 1.9% |
| Dec 2023 | 21.7% |
| Dec 2024 | 2.7% |
| Dec 2025 | 0.6% |
| Nov 2026 | 0.7% |
Why it matters
Fees decide how fast a payment confirms: pay too little at a busy hour and it can wait for hours or days.
They make small payments on busy blockchains impractical, which is why second-layer networks such as bitcoin’s Lightning exist.
In the long run they are bitcoin’s security budget: once new coins dwindle, fees alone will have to pay the miners.
A common mistake
Myth: Bigger payments pay bigger fees.
In fact: On bitcoin and Ethereum the fee depends on the space or computing a transaction needs and on how busy the network is, not on the amount. A $10 million payment can cost less than a $10 one.
Questions people ask
Why are bitcoin fees sometimes so high?
Because block space is fixed and demand is not. When many people send at once, the fee rate climbs until enough of them give up or wait. In quiet times a payment can cost cents; in a rush, tens of dollars.
What is gas on Ethereum?
The unit of computing work: a plain ether transfer uses 21,000 gas. Your fee is the gas used times the gas price, quoted in gwei, a billionth of an ether.
Who gets the transaction fee?
On bitcoin, the miner who includes the transaction in a block. On Ethereum, the base fee is burned and only the tip goes to the validator.
Read more on BigCapital
About the numbers
- The numbers on this page are recalculated from the data every night; the sources are listed at the end of the page.
- Bitcoin blocks per day: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric BlkCnt. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Bitcoin transaction fees per day: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric FeeTotNtv. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- New bitcoins per day: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric IssTotNtv. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Bitcoin price: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric PriceUSD. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- New ether per day: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric IssTotNtv. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Ether supply: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric SplyCur. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Ethereum price: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, metric PriceUSD. License: CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Crypto data: Coin Metrics Community Network Data, used under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
- This page explains a term. It is not investment advice.