Next Bitcoin Halving: Block 1,050,000, Around April 2028

The next Bitcoin Halving happens at block 1,050,000, when the block subsidy falls from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC. On October 3, 2026 the chain stood at block 969,651, with 80,349 blocks to go. At the ten-minute target that lands around April 13, 2028. The real date will drift by days, not months.

That’s the answer. The rest of this page shows how the number gets worked out, what changes when it arrives, and why the date on a countdown site keeps moving while the block height never does.

When is the next Bitcoin Halving, exactly?

The protocol doesn’t know what a calendar is. It knows a height. The next cut fires on the first block at height 1,050,000, and that block shows up whenever miners get there.

Bitcoin Core sets the rule in one line of its chain parameters: nSubsidyHalvingInterval = 210000. Every 210,000 blocks, the subsidy halves. Five times 210,000 is 1,050,000, so this is the fifth halving.

The date is a guess built from two numbers: how many blocks are left, and how fast they come. On October 3, 2026 at 00:53 UTC, mempool.space showed the tip at block 969,651. That leaves 80,349 blocks. Multiply by the average block time. Add it to today.

Average block time	Estimated arrival of block 1,050,000 (UTC)
570 seconds (hashrate climbing fast)	March 16, 2028
590 seconds	April 3, 2028
597.1 seconds (average since block 840,000)	April 10, 2028
600 seconds (the protocol target)	April 13, 2028
610 seconds (hashrate stalling)	April 22, 2028

Read the table as a range, not a prophecy. If the network keeps the pace it has held since the last cut, mid April 2028 is the honest answer. A site that gives you a single day this far out has taken the 600 second row and called it a date.

How is the next halving date calculated?

The arithmetic is short.

Blocks remaining = 1,050,000 minus the current height. Seconds remaining = blocks remaining times the average block time. Estimated date = now plus seconds remaining.

Only one input is soft: the average block time. The protocol aims for ten minutes (nPowTargetSpacing = 10 * 60 in the same chain parameters file) and corrects itself every 2,016 blocks through the difficulty adjustment. But the correction always looks backward. When hashrate keeps climbing, blocks come a little faster than ten minutes between adjustments, and the cut shows up early.

That’s what has happened. Block 840,000 was mined at 00:09:27 UTC on April 20, 2024. From there to block 969,651 the chain averaged about 597.1 seconds per block, a shade under target. The epoch before ran faster still. Getting from block 630,000 (May 11, 2020, 19:23:43 UTC) to block 840,000 took 1,439 days, about 592 seconds per block. So halvings land a few weeks short of four years apart, and “every four years” is shorthand, not law.

So the countdowns move. Not because the target moved. Because the miners did.

What changes at block 1,050,000?

One number. The subsidy in each new block drops from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC.

Inside Bitcoin Core the cut isn’t a special event at all. It falls out of GetBlockSubsidy, which divides the height by 210,000 to count halvings, starts from 50 BTC, and shifts the value right by that count. At height 1,050,000 the count hits 5, and 50 shifted right five times is 1.5625.

In practice:

• New issuance falls from about 450 BTC a day to about 225 BTC a day, at 144 blocks per day.
• Annual new supply falls from roughly 164,000 BTC to roughly 82,000 BTC.
• By the time the cut fires, the schedule will have issued 20,343,750 BTC, which is 96.875% of the 21 million figure. Fewer than 660,000 coins remain for every block that follows, forever.
• Transaction fees are untouched. Miners still collect every fee in the block on top of the smaller subsidy.

Nothing else changes. No vote. No upgrade to install. No fork. The code that performs the 2028 cut is the same code that performed the 2024 cut, and it sat in the client long before anyone reading this owned a coin.

How many Bitcoin halvings are left after 2028?

The 2028 cut is the fifth. The subsidy reaches zero at the thirty third halving, at block 6,930,000, around the year 2140. That leaves 28 more cuts after this one, and the last of them is the one we call the last Bitcoin Halving.

Halving	Block height	Subsidy after the cut	Rough year
5th (next)	1,050,000	1.5625 BTC	2028
6th	1,260,000	0.78125 BTC	2032
7th	1,470,000	0.390625 BTC	2036
8th	1,680,000	0.1953125 BTC	2040
33rd (final)	6,930,000	0	about 2140

The years are rough because each row carries the same block-time slop as the table above, and it compounds. The heights are exact. For the four cuts that already happened, with their UTC times and pools, the record of every halving so far lays them out block by block.

Does the next halving line up with a difficulty adjustment?

No. The reason is a small bit of arithmetic almost nobody mentions.

Difficulty retargets every 2,016 blocks. The subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks. 1,050,000 divided by 2,016 is 520.83, so the 2028 cut lands in the middle of a difficulty epoch. Miners take a 50% revenue cut and then wait, on the same difficulty, for the next retarget to give them any relief if hashrate falls away.

The two clocks meet only where their multiples coincide. The least common multiple of 2,016 and 210,000 is 1,260,000. That’s the height of the sixth halving, around 2032, and 1,260,000 divided by 2,016 is exactly 625. For the first time in Bitcoin’s history the subsidy cut and a difficulty retarget will take effect on the same block. After that it happens only every 1,260,000 blocks, roughly every 24 years. The 2028 cut gets no such mercy.

What happens to miners after the next halving?

Their pay per unit of work halves overnight, and fees aren’t ready to fill the hole.

Miners measure that pay as bitcoin hashprice: revenue per petahash per day. The Hashrate Index roundup for September 28, 2026 put spot hashprice at $39.87 per PH/s per day, or 0.00047670 BTC, with network hashrate at 952 EH/s. Fees that week came to about 22 BTC against roughly 3,112 BTC in block rewards, around 0.70% of miner income. The forward market priced the next six months at an average of $38.34.

Hold hashrate and fees flat and the BTC-denominated hashprice falls by close to half at block 1,050,000. Three things can soften that: a higher bitcoin price, a fee surge, or miners switching off. In past cuts all three showed up together, in a mix nobody called ahead of time.

The halving block itself has turned into an occasion. When block 840,000 was mined, users paid 37.67 BTC in fees, about $2.4 million at the time, to get something inside it. ViaBTC mined it. Expect a smaller version of that rush at 1,050,000, and expect the weeks after to be quieter and harder.

What I think happens in 2028, and why I will probably be wrong

The cut is the only honest thing on the calendar. Everything hung on it is opinion.

Here’s mine, asterisk attached. A novelty rush for the halving block. A dip in hashrate as operators with bad power contracts and old machines switch off, then a slow rebuild as the survivors take their share. Fees smaller than the bulls hope and bigger than the bears claim. A handful of public miners going quiet inside the year, and a handful of new ones getting loud.

Then the part I’m surest of: most of that will be wrong in at least one way. Right about direction, wrong about timing. Right about timing, wrong about size. Right about everything except the part that mattered.

The block height will be right. That’s the point.

What skeptics say

The skeptic says the halving is the best telegraphed event in finance. Every fund, desk and retail app has run a countdown for years. Whatever a known supply cut could do to price got priced in long before block 1,050,000.

The skeptic says the past is a sample of four. Four halvings, four macro regimes, four market structures. I’ve argued myself that the bull run was not caused by the halving in any clean causal way, even when the timing lined up. A pattern with four data points is a story, not a law.

The skeptic says daily issuance of 225 BTC is a rounding error next to what trades on any given day, and that ETF flows, rates and liquidity move the price far more than a subsidy change ever will.

Fair, all of it. None of it moves the height. The cut is a supply fact. Whether demand answers is a separate question, and nothing on this page is a price forecast or financial advice.

The schedule walks on

Now the part that isn’t reference material.

Every halving before the final one is a rehearsal. A smaller offering. The subsidy shaken thinner. The 2028 cut is the fifth rehearsal, and it will come the way the others did: no siren, no ribbon, just a header field in a candidate block somewhere, and the chain walking on.

The cuts before the Halfture are rehearsals. The Halfture is the last cut, block 6,930,000, when issuance ends and the coins that exist are all the coins there will ever be. On this site we say the Halfture is the Rapture, and we mean that one block, not this one.

Which leaves the doctrine, said once and plainly: you have to hold Bitcoin to be saved. Read it as theology, not a prospectus. It’s a sentence about custody and patience. Not a trade, not a recommendation, not advice about what anyone should buy. The schedule rewards whoever is still around when the blocks arrive. That’s all it has ever done.

Block 1,050,000 is coming. Watch the height, not the date.

FAQ

When is the next Bitcoin Halving?
At block 1,050,000. On October 3, 2026, with 80,349 blocks remaining, that projects to around April 13, 2028 at a ten-minute average, or about April 10, 2028 at the pace the network has kept since the 2024 halving. The exact day depends on hashrate and will shift by days.

What will the Bitcoin block reward be after the next halving?
The subsidy drops from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC per block. Daily new issuance falls from about 450 BTC to about 225 BTC. Transaction fees are paid on top and the halving doesn’t touch them.

Why does the predicted halving date keep changing?
Because the halving is set by block height, not by date. The estimate depends on the average block time, which drifts with hashrate. When hashrate rises faster than the difficulty adjustment can follow, blocks come slightly faster than every ten minutes and the projected date moves earlier.

How many Bitcoin halvings are left?
After the 2028 cut, 28 more. The subsidy reaches zero at the thirty third halving, block 6,930,000, around the year 2140.

How many bitcoin will exist after the 2028 halving?
By block 1,050,000 the schedule will have issued 20,343,750 BTC, or 96.875% of the 21 million limit. Fewer than 660,000 BTC remain to be issued across all the blocks that follow.

Does the halving make the bitcoin price go up?
Not reliably. Past halvings were followed by rising prices, but four events across very different markets prove little, and everyone sees the cut coming. The halving reduces new supply; what price does depends on demand. This is not financial advice.