Your Fee Is Not About Timing. It Is About Size

"Send on a Sunday, it's cheaper" was good advice in 2017, and again in 2021, and again during the ordinals crush. Measured across the last year it is worth about nine cents. The lever that still moves your fee by a factor of six is not the clock — it is how many coins you are spending.

Bitcoin fees are not priced per dollar sent. Moving $10 and moving $10,000,000 cost the same, because miners sell block space, not value transfer. What you pay is a simple product: the size of your transaction in virtual bytes, multiplied by the fee rate in satoshis per virtual byte. Everything else is commentary on those two numbers.

The formula, and a table that stays true

fee = transaction size (vB) × fee rate (sat/vB). Size is set by what your wallet builds; the rate is set by competition for the next block. Here is what typical transactions cost across the range of fee markets Bitcoin actually experiences, at a price of $85,645:

• Simple send, Taproot — 111 vB. $0.10 at 1 sat/vB, $0.48 at 5, $1.90 at 20, $9.51 at 100.
• Simple send, SegWit — 141 vB. $0.12 / $0.60 / $2.42 / $12.08.
• Simple send, legacy — 226 vB. $0.19 / $0.97 / $3.87 / $19.36.
• Multisig 2-of-3 spend — 189 vB. $0.16 / $0.81 / $3.24 / $16.19.
• Consolidating 10 coins — 721 vB. $0.62 / $3.09 / $12.35 / $61.75.

The dollar column moves with the Bitcoin price, but the ratios never do. A legacy send always costs 2.04× a Taproot one. A ten-input consolidation always costs 6.50×. Those multiples are fixed by the transaction format, and they are the part worth memorising.

What the last year actually looked like

Take the last thirty days first, because that is the measurement we can make densely: 1,423 blocks, about a third of every block mined in the period. 27.5% cleared with a median fee below 1 sat/vB, and 62.7% below 2. For a Taproot send, the entire fee is a rounding error against any amount worth sending.

Stretch back twelve months and the picture holds, with a caveat worth stating: the year-long history is sampled at roughly three blocks a day, about 2% of the chain, so it will understate brief spikes by construction. On that sample, 71.6% of blocks had a median fee under 2 sat/vB and 99.5% under 5. Treat those as the shape of the year rather than a census of it.

When the entire year fits between 1 and 2 sat/vB, timing your transaction is optimising a number that has already gone to zero.

The cheapest hour, honestly

There is a real weekly rhythm to Bitcoin fees. Block space demand follows working hours and weekday trading, so congested markets show a clear pattern: expensive on weekday afternoons in Europe and the Americas, cheap in the small hours and at weekends. Our fee heatmap exists to show exactly that, as a median by weekday and hour over a month of blocks.

We are not going to dress up what it currently shows. Binned by weekday and hour across the last year, the medians span 1 to 2 sat/vB. On a 111 vB Taproot send, moving from the dearest hour to the cheapest saves about $0.09. That is not a saving, it is a rounding difference, and any article telling you to schedule your payments around it in this market is selling something.

Two caveats we would rather state than bury. The yearly view samples roughly three blocks a day, so individual weekday-hour cells are thin and the fine detail is not load-bearing. And a low-fee regime is a regime, not a law: the heatmap earns its keep the moment congestion returns, which is precisely when the spread widens from 1 sat/vB to 50 and the pattern becomes worth thousands of sats.

What does move your fee

Three things, in descending order of how much they matter.

How many coins you spend. This dominates everything. Every additional input adds roughly 57.5 vB to a Taproot transaction. A wallet funded by forty small payments is carrying forty inputs' worth of future cost. At 20 sat/vB, each of those inputs costs about a dollar to spend, every time you spend it.

Which address type you use. Taproot is 111 vB where legacy is 226 for the same economic action. If your wallet still produces addresses starting with 1, you are paying roughly double for nothing.

When you consolidate. This is the one place timing genuinely pays, and it inverts the usual advice. Consolidating ten inputs costs $0.62 at 1 sat/vB and $61.75 at 100. A quiet fee market is not the time to ignore your wallet — it is the cheapest opportunity you will get to tidy it, and it converts an expensive future transaction into a cheap present one.

The part nobody mentions

Fees this low are not unambiguously good news. Miner revenue is subsidy plus fees, the subsidy halves every four years, and fees are the only part that can grow to replace it. A year in which no sampled block cleared above 10 sat/vB is a year in which the long-term security budget made almost no progress.

That is a real open question about Bitcoin's next few decades, and it is visible on the live fee page as the fees-to-reward ratio. Cheap transactions today and a funded security budget tomorrow are in genuine tension. Anyone who tells you otherwise is looking at one half of the chart.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to send Bitcoin? Size times rate. A simple Taproot transaction is 111 virtual bytes, so at 1 sat/vB it costs 111 satoshis — about $0.10 at a Bitcoin price of $85,645. The same transaction in a congested market at 100 sat/vB costs $9.51. The amount you send makes no difference.

What is the cheapest time to send Bitcoin? In a congested market, weekends and the small hours UTC, when demand for block space falls. In the current low-fee regime the difference between the cheapest and dearest hour is about 1 sat/vB, or roughly nine cents on a simple send — not worth scheduling around. Check the live heatmap rather than a rule of thumb.

Why is my Bitcoin fee higher than someone else's? Almost always because your transaction is larger, not because you were charged a worse rate. Spending many small coins, using legacy addresses, or spending from multisig all add virtual bytes, and you pay per byte.

Related reading: What Is Bitcoin Hashrate? on the security that fees ultimately have to pay for, and Bitcoin's 4-Year Cycle and the Halving on the subsidy schedule that makes the fee question urgent.

Fee distributions computed on 21 September 2026 from mempool.space block fee-rate history: 1,423 blocks over the last 30 days (roughly a third of all blocks in the period) and 1,096 blocks sampled across the last year (roughly 2%, so short spikes are under-represented). Transaction sizes are standard single-input, two-output constructions. Dollar figures use a Bitcoin price of $85,645.