Transaction Fees
How much are users paying to move Bitcoin on-chain?
Every Bitcoin transaction pays a fee to miners. Read more
Bitcoin's base layer has plenty of room today — you can send a transaction for pocket change. Blockspace is cheap when demand is low, which is good news if you want to transact, though it's lean times for miners.
Estimated by dividing the day's total fees by the day's transaction count. Actual per-transaction cost varies — this is an average across all transaction sizes and priorities.
Users are paying less to transact than they were a year ago, and the decline has been persistent.
- Price effect on USD fees. Same sats in fees means more USD fees when BTC price rises. A higher USD fee total can happen without any change in actual network congestion.
- Inscriptions & runes. These can dominate fee revenue for weeks at a time. Fee spikes from them aren't always signs of healthy demand for payments — they're demand for embedding data on Bitcoin.
- SegWit & Taproot. Over the years, protocol upgrades have let more transactions fit in each block. This tends to lower per-transaction fees during normal times, shifting the historical baseline.
- Mempool dynamics. Fees can spike briefly when the mempool backs up (e.g., after a slow block), then fall quickly. Daily fee totals can be distorted by a few hours of extreme conditions.
- Lightning offload. Small payments increasingly go through Lightning, which don't contribute to on-chain fees. Lower on-chain fee totals don't necessarily mean less Bitcoin usage.
Understanding Transaction Fees
What fees tell you. Every Bitcoin transaction pays a fee to get confirmed, and those fees go to miners. Total daily fees in USD is a measure of how much money users collectively paid to access Bitcoin's base layer on a given day. It's one of the clearest signals of blockspace demand.
What high and low fees mean. High fee totals usually mean blockspace is scarce — demand exceeds the fixed block size, so users bid each other up. Low fee totals mean blockspace is abundant — there's plenty of room, so fees settle near the minimum. High isn't automatically bullish and low isn't automatically bearish; context matters. A healthy bull market can have high fees from genuine usage, or from inscription-style activity that doesn't reflect real economic demand.
Why spikes happen. Fee spikes usually come from a sudden surge in demand: inscription or runes events, major price moves creating urgency to move coins, mempool congestion, or simply a rush during a volatile period. A spike without a persistent rise afterward tells you it was event-driven — not a regime change. That's what the "Fee spike" state on this page flags, so you don't mistake a one-off event for a lasting trend.