Bitcoin fee market, 2013–now
Average total fees paid per block since 2013, plotted against BTC price on a log scale. Fee spikes track block-space demand — congestion events, fee-market cycles, and inscription waves — independent of the price cycle itself. Drag to zoom into any period.
How Bitcoin transaction fees are set
Bitcoin fees are not a percentage of the amount sent. They are priced per byte of data a transaction occupies, because the scarce resource is space in a block, not value transferred. Sending one bitcoin and sending ten thousand cost the same if the transactions are the same size. What changes the price is competition: when more transactions are waiting than the next block can hold, users bid higher fee rates to jump the queue.
This chart plots the average total fees paid per block, denominated in satoshis, against BTC price on a log scale. Showing both on one canvas is the point — it makes clear how weakly the two are coupled. Some of the largest fee spikes in Bitcoin's history happened well away from price peaks.
The eras this chart covers
From 2013 to 2016, fees were close to a rounding error. Blocks were rarely full, and the block subsidy dwarfed fee income. The first sustained fee market arrived with the 2017 bull run, when blocks began filling consistently and the mempool stayed backlogged for weeks at a time — the period that drove much of the scaling debate and the eventual SegWit activation.
The 2021 cycle produced elevated but less extreme fees, partly because SegWit and batching by exchanges had improved effective capacity. From 2023 onward a genuinely new driver appeared: inscription and token protocols that use Bitcoin transactions to store arbitrary data. These competed for block space on their own schedule, producing fee spikes with no corresponding move in price or in the number of people transacting.
Reading it without over-reading it
A fee spike is evidence of demand for block space, which is not the same as demand for bitcoin. The three distinct causes — organic transaction growth, data-inscription waves, and short-lived mining variance — look similar on this chart and mean very different things. Cross-referencing with active addresses separates the first from the second: a fee spike alongside rising address activity is monetary demand, while a fee spike with flat address counts is usually something else competing for the same space. Fees also matter for Bitcoin's long-run security budget, since the block subsidy halves every four years and eventually disappears entirely.
Common questions
Do I need an account to see the chart?
Yes, and it is free — no card required. The written history and methodology on this page are open to everyone; the interactive full-history chart requires signing in.
Why are Bitcoin fees sometimes so high?
Because block space is capped and sold by auction. When more transactions are broadcast than the next block can fit, users outbid each other for inclusion. High fees reflect congestion, not the value being sent.
Do fees depend on how much Bitcoin I send?
No. Fees are priced by transaction size in bytes, which depends on how many inputs and outputs the transaction has — not on the amount. A large payment from one input can cost less than a small payment consolidating many.
What happens to fees when the block subsidy runs out?
Fees become the entire mining incentive. That transition is decades away, but it is why the share of miner revenue coming from fees is tracked as a fundamental rather than a curiosity. The Fee Market page charts that share directly.
Related on Alphabit
- Bitcoin fee market — current mempool and block-space pressure
- Lightning Network adoption — the main off-chain response to high fees
- Bitcoin network activity — hash rate, addresses, throughput
- Bitcoin risk model — the composite cycle score
Data is provided for research and education. Nothing here is financial advice — see the disclosure.