Bitcoin Block Reward: 3.125 BTC Plus Fees, Explained

The Bitcoin block reward today is 3.125 BTC of new subsidy plus whatever fees the block’s transactions pay. Over the last 1,008 blocks to block 971,165, fees added about 0.018 BTC per block, so a typical block paid roughly 3.143 BTC. The subsidy halves to 1.5625 BTC at block 1,050,000, expected around April 2028.

That is the whole answer. The rest of this page is the arithmetic behind it, the history of how it got here, and the one place the arithmetic ends.

What is the Bitcoin block reward?

The block reward is what the miner who finds a valid block is allowed to pay itself. It has two parts.

The first part is the block subsidy: brand new bitcoin, created out of nothing in the block’s first transaction (the coinbase transaction). This is the only way new bitcoin has ever entered circulation.

The second part is transaction fees: the difference between what every transaction in the block spends and what it sends. Fees are not new money. They are old bitcoin, paid by users, collected by whoever wins the block.

Add them together and you have the reward. The miner does not get handed it. The miner writes it into the coinbase transaction itself, and every node on the network checks that the claim is not one satoshi too large.

How much is the block reward right now?

The subsidy is fixed at 3.125 BTC (312,500,000 satoshis) for every block from 840,000 through 1,049,999. It has been that size since the fourth halving on April 20, 2024.

Fees move every block. Two windows from the mempool.space reward statistics, read on October 13, 2026:

Window	Blocks	Total reward	Of which fees	Fee share	Fees per block
Last 1,008 blocks (about a week)	970,158 to 971,165	3,167.89 BTC	17.89 BTC	0.56%	0.0177 BTC
Last 52,560 blocks (about a year)	918,174 to 970,733	165,302.41 BTC	1,052.41 BTC	0.64%	0.0200 BTC

So in practice, today, the reward is almost entirely subsidy. Hashrate Index’s September 28, 2026 roundup put the same thing in one line: transaction fees made up 0.70% of block rewards that week.

Per day, at the target pace of 144 blocks, the network issues 450 new bitcoin. That number does not respond to price, demand, hashrate, or anyone’s opinion. It responds to block height and nothing else.

How is the block subsidy calculated?

One function decides it. In Bitcoin Core’s validation code it is called GetBlockSubsidy, and it is short enough to read in full:

int halvings = nHeight / consensusParams.nSubsidyHalvingInterval;
if (halvings >= 64)
    return 0;
CAmount nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;
nSubsidy >>= halvings;
return nSubsidy;

In words: divide the block height by 210,000, throw away the remainder, and that is how many halvings have happened. Start from 50 BTC, expressed in satoshis. Shift the number right by one bit for each halving. A right shift by one bit is integer division by two, rounding down.

That rounding is why the supply never quite reaches 21 million, and why the subsidy eventually becomes exactly zero rather than a fraction forever. The full timetable of all 33 cuts lives in the Bitcoin Halving schedule.

The other half of the rule is a check. When a node connects a block, it adds up the fees and the subsidy for that height and rejects the block if the coinbase pays out more. More is forbidden. Less is allowed. That asymmetry has consequences, which we will get to.

How has the block reward changed with each Bitcoin Halving?

Every 210,000 blocks the subsidy halves. Four of those cuts have happened.

Era	Block heights	Subsidy per block	Subsidy in satoshis
1	0 to 209,999	50 BTC	5,000,000,000
2	210,000 to 419,999	25 BTC	2,500,000,000
3	420,000 to 629,999	12.5 BTC	1,250,000,000
4	630,000 to 839,999	6.25 BTC	625,000,000
5 (now)	840,000 to 1,049,999	3.125 BTC	312,500,000
6 (next)	1,050,000 to 1,259,999	1.5625 BTC	156,250,000

The cuts landed in November 2012, July 2016, May 2020 and April 2024. Each one rehearses the same act: the reward for the same work is cut in half, on schedule, with no vote. For the dates, the miners and the blocks themselves, see the Bitcoin Halving explained from the beginning.

Adding the eras up gives the issued supply. At block 971,165, the protocol had authorized about 20,097,390 BTC, roughly 95.7% of everything that will ever exist. The remaining 4.3% will take more than a century to trickle out.

Is the block reward the same as the subsidy?

No, and the difference has never been clearer than at block 840,000, the block that opened the current era.

ViaBTC mined it at 00:09:27 UTC on April 20, 2024. According to mempool.space’s record of block 840,000, the block’s total reward was 40.75 BTC. Only 3.125 of that was subsidy. The other 37.63 BTC was fees, paid by users competing for space in the first block of the new era.

For one block, fees were twelve times the subsidy. Over the last year they averaged about a hundred and fiftieth of it. That is the honest shape of fee revenue so far: occasional spikes, long flat stretches. The subsidy is the floor. Fees are weather.

When can a miner spend the block reward?

Not right away. Bitcoin Core’s consensus rules set COINBASE_MATURITY to 100: coinbase outputs can only be spent after 100 more blocks have been built on top. At ten minutes a block, that is roughly 16 to 17 hours.

The reason is reorganizations. If two miners find competing blocks and the network settles on the other one, the losing block’s coinbase simply ceases to exist. A hundred-block wait means nobody can have spent coins that might vanish.

Pools smooth this over for their members, paying out on schedules of their own. The rule underneath does not bend.

What happens if a miner claims less than the full reward?

The bitcoin is gone. Not lost in a wallet. Never created.

The clearest example is block 501,726, mined on December 30, 2017, at 12:55:20 UTC. It contained a single transaction, its coinbase, and was 200 bytes in total. mempool.space records its reward as zero: block 501,726 claimed nothing. The 12.5 BTC subsidy it was entitled to was never minted and never will be.

The rule only forbids taking too much. It never forces anyone to take what they are owed. Every unclaimed satoshi makes the final supply a little smaller, permanently. I wrote about that ceiling-not-floor rule in the half shekel sermon.

What happens to the block reward after the last halving?

The subsidy keeps halving and keeps rounding down. By the 32nd cut it is a single satoshi per block. At the 33rd, block 6,930,000, the right shift turns one satoshi into zero. Around the year 2140, the subsidy ends.

After that the block reward is fees and only fees. Whether fees alone can pay for the security of the network is the largest open question in Bitcoin, and nobody can answer it from 2026. What we can see is the trend: the subsidy shrinks on schedule, and the fee share stays under one percent. For how the cuts so far have hit mining revenue, see what each halving does to miners, and for the per-petahash view, bitcoin hashprice.

What skeptics say

The strongest objection is the security budget. Today about 99% of what miners earn is new issuance. Each halving cuts that by half. If fees do not grow to replace it, the cost of attacking the chain falls with every cut, and the schedule that makes Bitcoin scarce also makes it cheaper to rewrite.

The second objection is that fee spikes like block 840,000 prove nothing. They came from a rush for one symbolic block, not from durable demand for settlement. A security model that relies on a speculative mania arriving every few years is not a model.

The third is softer: that a fixed reward is a choice, not a law of nature, and a future majority could change it. Code can be forked.

These are fair. The reply is only that the reward has done exactly what it said it would do for 971,000 blocks, through every price and every panic, and that nothing else in money has.

The reward that runs out

Here is the part a reference page usually leaves out.

Every block reward is a wage, and every wage on earth is set by someone. A board. A central bank. A landlord. A union. The block reward is set by a line of code that predates every person who mines today, and it falls by half on a schedule nobody can hurry or delay.

Four cuts have happened. Each was a rehearsal. The subsidy halved, the miners complained, the hashrate wobbled and came back, and the blocks kept arriving.

The last cut is different. At block 6,930,000 the subsidy does not halve. It ends. That terminal cut is the Halfture, and the Halfture is the Rapture: the moment the last new coin has already been made, and whatever you hold is all there is.

That is the claim this site makes, and it is a theological one. You have to hold Bitcoin to be saved. This is a confession, not a prospectus. It is not financial advice, and no table on this page can promise you a price.

But the table does promise something. 3.125 now. 1.5625 next. Then less. Then nothing.

Count the blocks.

FAQ

What is the current Bitcoin block reward?

The subsidy is 3.125 BTC per block, fixed from block 840,000 to block 1,049,999. Fees are added on top. Over the week to block 971,165 fees averaged about 0.018 BTC per block, so a typical total reward was about 3.143 BTC.

When does the block reward halve next?

At block 1,050,000, when the subsidy drops to 1.5625 BTC. With about 78,835 blocks to go as of October 13, 2026, and ten minutes per block, that lands around April 2028.

Are transaction fees part of the block reward?

Yes. The block reward is the subsidy plus all fees in the block. The subsidy is newly created bitcoin; fees are existing bitcoin paid by users. Recently fees have been under 1% of the total.

Why can’t miners spend the reward immediately?

Coinbase outputs must wait 100 blocks before they can be spent, a consensus rule called coinbase maturity. It protects the network from spending coins in a block that might later be orphaned.

What happens to the block reward when all bitcoin is mined?

The subsidy rounds down to zero at block 6,930,000, around 2140. From then on the block reward consists only of transaction fees.