A Bitcoin mining reward is what the miner who adds a valid block receives: newly created bitcoin (the block subsidy) plus the transaction fees paid by every transaction in that block. Since block 840,000 (20 April 2024, UTC) the subsidy has been 3.125 BTC per block. It halves every 210,000 blocks, so the next cut, to 1.5625 BTC, comes at block 1,050,000.
The two parts of the reward
Block subsidy
The subsidy is the newly issued bitcoin. It is set by the protocol, not by the market. In Bitcoin Core the rule is a short function, GetBlockSubsidy. It starts at 50 BTC and halves once for every 210,000 blocks of height. After 64 halvings it returns zero. The code comment says the cut happens "approximately every 4 years".
| Reward era | Starts at block | Subsidy per block |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 50 BTC |
| 2 | 210,000 | 25 BTC |
| 3 | 420,000 | 12.5 BTC |
| 4 | 630,000 | 6.25 BTC |
| 5 (current) | 840,000 (20 April 2024) | 3.125 BTC |
| 6 | 1,050,000 | 1.5625 BTC |
Transaction fees
Each transaction can leave a fee: the difference between its inputs and its outputs. The miner who includes the transaction collects that fee. Bitcoin's developer reference states that the block's first transaction "spend[s] the block subsidy and collected transaction fees".
How a miner actually gets paid
- The generation transaction. Every block must contain at least one transaction, and the first one must be the generation transaction. It has no real inputs. It creates the new subsidy and pays it, together with the block's fees, to an address the miner chooses. Under BIP34 its input must also record the block height.
- A hard ceiling. When nodes validate a block, they compute the allowed reward as fees plus the subsidy for that height. If the generation transaction pays out more, Bitcoin Core rejects the block as invalid. A miner can claim less than the maximum but never more.
- The 100-block wait. Bitcoin Core sets a maturity constant of 100 for the generation transaction. The reward cannot be spent until 100 more blocks have been added on top. The developer guide explains why: if the block later becomes stale and drops out of the chain, the reward goes with it, and no one will have spent it yet.
Producing a valid block means finding a block header whose hash meets the network's difficulty target. Every 2,016 blocks the network recalculates difficulty against a two-week target window, which averages out to one block about every 10 minutes. When more miners join, difficulty rises and the pace stays steady. As a result, the reward schedule follows block height, not calendar dates.
How much new bitcoin do miners earn per day?
Enter the subsidy per block, the number of blocks found per day and an average fee per block to see the network-wide miner reward per day.
| Block subsidy per block (3.125 BTC since block 840,000; 1.5625 BTC from the next halving) | Blocks found per day (about 144 at one block every 10 minutes) | Average transaction fees per block | Total miner reward per day across the network |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.125 BTC | 144 blocks | 0 BTC | 450 BTC |
| 3.125 BTC | 144 blocks | 0 BTC | 450 BTC |
| 1.5625 BTC | 144 blocks | 0 BTC | 225 BTC |
- The fee figure is your own input, not a figure from any source; with fees at zero the result is new issuance only.
- About 144 blocks a day follows from the 10-minute average; the real count changes from day to day.
- The result is the total for all miners on the network, not the income of a single miner or pool.
This is arithmetic on your inputs only: it cannot predict fee levels or future block times, and it leaves out electricity, hardware and any one miner's share of the hashrate.
Where the schedule ends
- Supply cap. Bitcoin.org says only 21 million bitcoin will ever be created. Amounts are stored in whole satoshis and the subsidy is rounded down at each halving, so the exact total comes to 20,999,999.9769 BTC (Bitcoin Wiki, "Controlled supply").
- Last subsidy. The subsidy falls to zero at block 6,930,000, so block 6,929,999 is the last one that pays any. The Bitcoin Wiki estimates this would come around 2140 if mining power stayed constant.
- After that. Miners would then earn only fees. Bitcoin.org's FAQ says miners "will probably be supported exclusively by numerous small transaction fees".
What the halvings mean for miners
Each halving cuts the bitcoin a miner earns per block by half overnight, while electricity and hardware costs stay the same. After the April 2024 halving, The Block estimated that daily new issuance fell from about 900 BTC to about 450 BTC. Fees become a larger share of income as the subsidy shrinks. How large depends on demand for block space, and that varies from block to block.
The block that follows block 1,050,000 is the first to pay 1.5625 BTC. If blocks keep arriving about every 10 minutes, that height is about four years after April 2024. The actual date depends on how fast blocks are found.
Other proof-of-work coins, and Ethereum
Other proof-of-work networks set their own reward schedules, so Bitcoin's figures apply only to Bitcoin. Ethereum no longer has mining rewards. It moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in The Merge on 15 September 2022, and validators who stake ETH replaced miners.
Limitations: this explains how Bitcoin's consensus rules work today; fee levels and future block times cannot be known in advance.
