Median Fee Rate

What this measures

This chart tracks the median fee rate of transactions included in mined blocks, in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB), based on mempool.space data. It does not tell you what to pay for the next block. It shows what users actually paid, period after period.

Why you pay by weight, not by amount

On Bitcoin, fees have nothing to do with the amount being sent. Moving 0.001 BTC or 100 BTC costs the same if both transactions have the same structure. What matters is the room a transaction takes up in a block, measured in virtual bytes (vbytes). A simple SegWit transaction with 1 input and 2 outputs takes up about 140 vB: at 10 sat/vB, it costs about 1,400 satoshis.

A transaction therefore gets heavier when it spends many inputs, for instance after receiving lots of small payments. Address type matters too: SegWit and Taproot inputs weigh less than older ones.

How to read the chart

A median flattens the extremes: within the same block, some transactions pay far more, others the bare minimum. The priorities wallets offer, “next block” or “within an hour”, are estimates, not guarantees: a block can be slow to arrive, and better-paying transactions can jump the queue. The state of that queue shows up in mempool size.

To unstick a transaction, there is also Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP). The recipient spends the still-unconfirmed output with a high fee: miners, who assess both transactions together, then have every reason to include the first one in order to collect the fee on the second.

Fees set the price of self-custody

Fees pay miners alongside a block subsidy that halves every 210,000 blocks, roughly every 4 years. In the long run, they are what will have to fund the network’s security. Their weight can be followed in block fees.

They also set a price of entry. When fees climb, a UTXO worth a few thousand satoshis can cost more to spend than it is worth. For small holders, on-chain self-custody becomes expensive, and leaving coins on a platform becomes tempting.

Layer 2s such as Lightning or Ark exist partly for this reason: holding and spending small amounts without paying on-chain fees for every move.

🪙 What is the Ark protocol? The missing piece to make Bitcoin a scalable everyday currency

Everything hinges on that balance: fees that stay too low weaken miner revenue over time, fees that run too high push small users off the chain. Nothing guarantees the market will settle on a level that works for both.