Network fee

A bitcoin transaction doesn’t name its fee. It spends some coins and creates new outputs, and whatever it doesn’t pass on goes to the miner who puts it in a block.

Blocks have limited room, and miners take first the transactions that pay more for the space they use. So the fee depends on two things:

• Size, not amount. “You pay for the size of your transaction in the block, not for the amount of bitcoin you send,” as bitcoin.org puts it. Wallets quote the rate in satoshis per virtual byte, and a simple payment takes about 140 virtual bytes, so sending 50 USD of bitcoin can cost as much as sending 50,000 USD.
• Demand. When many transactions are waiting in the mempool, the rate it takes to get into the next block rises. On April 20, 2024, the day of the fourth halving, as people rushed to create new tokens on bitcoin, the average fee per transaction reached about 128 dollars, more than on any day before, according to YCharts data reported by The Block. The next day it was about 35.

A fee set too low isn’t lost: the transaction waits, then confirms when demand falls or is eventually dropped, and many wallets can raise its fee. In September 2025, Bitcoin Core lowered the minimum fee rate its nodes pass on, by default, from 1 satoshi per virtual byte to 0.1.

Other networks charge fees too, each in its own coin: ETH on Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum, SOL on Solana, TRX on Tron. So sending digital dollars takes a little of that coin, not dollars, though some apps pay it for you; the guide on sending and receiving digital dollars explains. An app’s withdrawal fee is its own charge, on top: the guide on what buying bitcoin really costs separates the two.