Fees follow human schedules. This is the median fee rate for every weekday and hour over the last month of blocks — in your own timezone.
Blocks arrive roughly every ten minutes whatever the day. Demand for space in them does not: people transact during their waking hours, exchanges batch withdrawals on business schedules, and trading activity clusters around market hours. The result is a weekly rhythm in the fee market that repeats reliably enough to plan around.
The grid above is the median fee rate of confirmed blocks for each weekday and hour over the last month, drawn in your own timezone. Green is cheap, red is expensive. Weekend nights are usually the quietest, and if you are consolidating UTXOs or moving coins into cold storage — a transaction that almost never needs to happen this minute — waiting for a green cell is free money.
For a simple transaction the difference between a busy weekday afternoon and a quiet Sunday morning is often several times the fee. On a consolidation spending many inputs, where size runs into hundreds of virtual bytes, the same ratio applies to a much bigger number. Nothing about the transaction changes — only when you broadcast it.
Typically weekend nights and early mornings, when transaction demand falls but blocks keep arriving every ten minutes. The heatmap above shows the actual pattern from the last month of blocks in your local timezone, so you can read the current rhythm rather than rely on a rule of thumb.
Yes, if the transaction is not urgent. A transaction sits in the mempool until a miner includes it, and you choose the fee rate when you broadcast. For non-urgent transfers, broadcasting during a quiet window at a low fee rate is the simplest saving available.
Satoshis per virtual byte — the price you pay per unit of block space. Your total fee is your transaction's size in vBytes times the rate you choose. This is why consolidating many small inputs is expensive: it makes a physically larger transaction.
It matters less than the state of the mempool. If a backlog builds, fees stay elevated regardless of the hour. The weekly pattern is a reliable tendency, not a guarantee — always check the current mempool before broadcasting.
mempool.space's block fee-rate history for the last month, aggregated into a 7 × 24 median matrix in your browser and converted to your local timezone. The result is cached locally for 12 hours.