Network Fee Estimator

A Bitcoin transaction fee is the fee rate in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB) multiplied by the size of your transaction, not a percentage of the amount sent. A standard transaction with one input and two outputs is about 140 vB, so at a rate of 10 sat/vB it costs roughly 1,400 satoshis. The estimator above shows the live cost in both satoshis and US dollars.

Sat/vB means satoshis per virtual byte. Miners choose transactions by fee rate rather than total fee, because block space is limited by size. Paying a higher sat/vB rate buys a place higher in the queue, so a small transaction paying a high rate confirms before a large transaction paying a low one.

Virtual size depends on how many coins you spend and how many outputs you create, not on the amount. For native SegWit (P2WPKH) each input adds about 68 vB, each output about 31 vB, and the transaction overhead is about 10 vB. Consolidating many small inputs makes a transaction larger and therefore more expensive to send.

Fees rise when more transactions are waiting than the next few blocks can hold. Because block space is fixed, competition for it is what sets the price. Demand spikes from ordinals, exchange flows, or volatility push the next-block rate up, while the economy and minimum rates usually stay far lower.

A transaction with a fee rate below current demand stays unconfirmed in the mempool, sometimes for days, and can eventually be dropped by nodes. Many wallets support replace-by-fee (RBF) to raise the rate afterwards, or child-pays-for-parent (CPFP) where the recipient bumps it instead.

Newhedge refreshes the recommended rates every two minutes from a live Bitcoin node's fee estimator. The timestamp beside the rates shows when the current figures were captured.