Halvings

Where you're going: A halving is just a number cut in half, but it's the most important number in Bitcoin's monetary policy. You'll learn what one is, why the schedule exists, what happened at each of the four so far, and what changes for miners and holders when the next one hits.

1. What a Halving Is

Every 210,000 blocks, the amount of new bitcoin paid to miners for finding the next block gets cut in half.

That's it. That's the whole event.

The block subsidy started at 50 BTC when the network launched in January 2009. It dropped to 25 at block 210,000 (November 2012), to 12.5 at block 420,000 (July 2016), to 6.25 at 630,000 (May 2020) and to 3.125 at 840,000 (April 2024). It is still 3.125 as of October 2026.

The next halving will be at block 1,050,000. As of October 2026 it is expected around April 2028, and the subsidy will drop to 1.5625 BTC.

Next halving

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Estimate assumes 600-second average blocks. Real blocks vary, so with a year or more to go the date can move by days or weeks. It narrows to hours only in the last few days.

2. The Why: Disinflation by Design

Halvings are not a quirk. They are the central mechanism of Bitcoin's monetary policy.

The idea borrows from gold mining. New gold enters circulation only when someone spends real resources digging it up, and new bitcoin appears only when miners spend electricity to find blocks.

The schedules are different, though. Gold mining has not slowed down. About two-thirds of all the gold ever mined came out of the ground after 1950, and the World Gold Council's first estimates put 2025 mine output at a record high. Mines produced roughly 3,300 to 3,672 tonnes that year, depending on whose estimate you use, which grew gold's above-ground supply by about 1.5 to 1.7%. About 222,600 tonnes had been mined in all of history by mid-2026.

Bitcoin's issuance is front-loaded and fixed in code. Half of all coins were issued in the first four years, and the rate halves every 210,000 blocks after that.

The result is a disinflationary asset: not just stable in supply, but with a decreasing rate of new issuance. Each halving reduces Bitcoin's annual inflation rate (see the Supply Schedule rabbit hole, which also compares it with the dollar). As of October 2026 the rate is about 0.8% a year, and after the next halving it will be roughly 0.4%.

This wasn't accidental. From the whitepaper:

"The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended."

Satoshi used gold mining to explain how new coins get issued. The paper's title, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," says what the coins were for.

3. The Schedule

The halving schedule in full, projecting forward. Each interval is a reward era - the 210,000-block period during which a fixed subsidy applies:

Halving	Block	Approx. date	New subsidy	% of total mined
Genesis	0	Jan 3, 2009	50 BTC	0%
1	210,000	Nov 28, 2012	25 BTC	50%
2	420,000	Jul 9, 2016	12.5 BTC	75%
3	630,000	May 11, 2020	6.25 BTC	87.5%
4	840,000	Apr 20, 2024	3.125 BTC	93.75%
5	1,050,000	~Apr 2028	1.5625 BTC	96.875%
6	1,260,000	~2032	0.78125 BTC	98.4375%
7	1,470,000	~2036	0.390625 BTC	99.22%
...	...	...	...	...
33	6,930,000	~2140	0 (rounds down)	100%

Dates are UTC. Block 840,000 was mined at 00:09 UTC on April 20, 2024, which was still the evening of April 19 in the Americas.

Each halving cuts the amount left to mine in half. After halving 1, half of all bitcoin had been issued. After halving 2, three-quarters. After halving 4, 93.75%. As of October 2026, about 95.7% has been mined.

The end point is fixed too. Bitcoin counts in whole satoshis, so the subsidy reaches exactly 1 satoshi at halving 32 and zero at halving 33, around 2140. After that, miners earn revenue only from transaction fees.

4. The Four That Have Happened

A halving is more than an arithmetic event. It's a moment of structural change for the mining industry, with downstream effects on price, narrative, and network security. Here's what each looked like:

1st Halving - November 28, 2012

• Block 210,000. Subsidy dropped from 50 to 25 BTC.
• Mining ran mostly on GPUs, with some FPGAs, at this point. The first ASIC miners shipped to customers about two months later, in January 2013.
• Price at the halving: about $12. Twelve months later: about $1,000.
• Aftermath: First proof that the halving schedule actually executes as designed. Sounds obvious; was novel.

2nd Halving - July 9, 2016

• Block 420,000. Subsidy dropped from 25 to 12.5 BTC.
• ASIC era in full swing. China dominated mining hash share.
• Price at the halving: about $650. Twelve months later: about $2,500.
• Aftermath: The 2017 bull market and SegWit activation (block 481,824, August 2017) both came within the next 18 months.

3rd Halving - May 11, 2020

• Block 630,000. Subsidy dropped from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC.
• Happened two months after the March 2020 COVID crash. In those same weeks the Federal Reserve's balance sheet grew from $4.3 trillion (March 11) to $6.9 trillion (May 13, 2020), the biggest nine-week increase in dollars on record. Strange juxtaposition.
• Price at the halving: about $8,600. Twelve months later: about $56,000.
• Aftermath: Massive institutional adoption wave, MicroStrategy bought, Tesla bought, El Salvador adopted.

4th Halving - April 20, 2024 (UTC)

• Block 840,000. Subsidy dropped from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC.
• The halving block carried 37.6 BTC in fees, 12 times its 3.125 BTC subsidy. Runes, a token protocol from Casey Rodarmor (who also created Ordinals), switched on at exactly block 840,000. Transactions carrying rune data paid about 98% of that block's fees.
• Fee record. As of October 2026, April 20, 2024 was still the biggest day for fees in dollar terms in blockchain.com's records, about $81 million. Block 840,000 was not a record for a single block, though. Block 409,008 carried 291 BTC in fees in 2016, almost all of it from one transaction.
• Price at the halving: about $64,000. Twelve months later: about $85,000.
• Context: The SEC had approved US spot bitcoin ETFs on January 10, 2024, three months before the halving. The price also passed its old all-time high in March 2024, before the halving. In the three earlier cycles, the old high was broken only after the halving.

After each of the four halvings from 2012 to 2024, the price set a new all-time high within about eight months. The highest price in the two years after each halving came 12 to 18 months in. From the halving price to that two-year high, the rise was about 90x after 2012, 30x after 2016, 8x after 2020 and just under 2x after 2024. We'll come back to whether any of this is causation, correlation, or coincidence.

5. The Mining Economics of a Halving

A halving cuts miner revenue in half overnight. (Or, more precisely, it cuts the subsidy portion of revenue in half; fees are unaffected.)

What this looks like in practice:

Before halving 4: from January 1, 2024 to the halving (blocks 823,786 to 839,999), the average block paid its miner 6.25 BTC of subsidy plus about 0.44 BTC in fees, about 6.69 BTC in all.

After halving 4: with the same fees, an average block pays 3.125 + 0.44, about 3.57 BTC.

The hardware cost, the electricity cost, and the difficulty are all the same the day before and the day after. Revenue, in BTC terms, drops by about 47%. (In April 2024 fees did not stay the same. They jumped when Runes launched at block 840,000, then fell back within about a week. More on that below.)

This puts pressure on miners. Specifically:

• Inefficient miners get pushed out. If your power cost was breakeven at the old reward, you're losing money at the new one. You either upgrade hardware, find cheaper power, or shut down.
• Hash rate drops temporarily. Marginal miners going offline reduces total network hash rate.
• Difficulty adjusts down. Bitcoin recalculates difficulty every 2,016 blocks, based on how fast those blocks came. With less hash rate, blocks come slower, so the next adjustment makes mining easier and more profitable for the survivors. After each of the four halvings so far, difficulty went down at least once within about four weeks.
• Equilibrium is reached. In all four cases, difficulty then climbed back above its pre-halving level, somewhere between about five weeks and three and a half months after the halving.

If Bitcoin's price doesn't rise to compensate, the halving is a major test of network security. To fully make up for a halving in dollar terms, the price has to double. It doubled within 2 to 10 months of each of the first three halvings. After the 2024 halving, the highest daily close through early October 2026 was about $125,000, on October 6, 2025. That was a little short of double the roughly $64,000 price at the halving.

Hash rate recovered anyway. Difficulty was back above its pre-halving level by July 31, 2024, and despite some dips it kept rising until late 2025, when it peaked about 80% above its level at the halving. It then eased. In early October 2026 it was still about 54% higher than at the halving.

Fees helped only briefly. The Runes launch pushed fees on April 20, 2024 to about $81 million for the day, and within about a week daily fees were back below their early-2024 average.

6. The Price Mythology (and What's Actually True)

You will hear, often, that "halvings cause bull markets." This is the most commonly repeated and most superficially analyzed claim in Bitcoin.

Here's what is actually true:

The first-order effect. A halving cuts the flow of new bitcoin entering the market in half. If demand stays constant, less new supply should, all else equal, push prices up. The catch is that the halving's block height is public years ahead, so traders can try to price it in long before it arrives.

The complication. "All else equal" never holds. The 2020 halving came two months into the Fed's COVID-era balance-sheet expansion, which ran until April 2022. The 2024 halving came three months after the SEC approved US spot bitcoin ETFs. Attributing the price action that followed only to the halving is bad statistics.

The honest take. Halvings are a factor in Bitcoin's price dynamics, alongside macroeconomic conditions, regulatory developments, narrative cycles, and adoption growth. They are not magical. People call the price swings around halvings the 4-year cycle. Four halvings are not enough data to call it a law.

Anyone who tells you with high confidence what the price will be 18 months after the next halving is selling you something. The structural case for Bitcoin rests on a supply schedule that is fixed and public, and that no single person or company can change. What people will pay for that supply is a separate question, and nobody can promise you a number.

7. The Long Tail

After halving 32 (block 6,720,000, around 2136), the subsidy will be exactly 1 satoshi per block. After halving 33 (block 6,930,000, around 2140), integer rounding takes the subsidy to zero. From that point forward, miners earn nothing from new issuance.

This is sometimes posed as a worry: how will the network be secured when the subsidy is gone?

The design answer is fees. The whitepaper says that once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, "the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees." The data through October 2026 doesn't show whether fees will ever be big enough to pay for strong security on their own.

Here is the fee share of everything miners were paid, measured from block data on mempool.space:

• January 1, 2024 to halving 4 (blocks 823,786 to 839,999): about 6.6%, or 0.44 BTC per block next to a 6.25 BTC subsidy.
• The first 2,016 blocks after halving 4 (to May 4, 2024, the Runes rush): about 33%.
• Calendar 2024: about 6.5%.
• Calendar 2025: about 1.0%.
• The year to October 2026 (the 52,560 blocks up to block 970,650): about 0.6%, or about 0.02 BTC per block next to a 3.125 BTC subsidy.
• Everything since halving 4 (blocks 840,000 to 970,650): about 2.5%, most of it earned in 2024.

Fees spiked for about a week after halving 4, then drifted down. By 2025 they were a smaller share of miner revenue than before the halving, even though the subsidy had been cut in half. As of October 2026, the subsidy is doing nearly all the work.

The plan is still for fees to be 100% of miner revenue once the subsidy reaches zero, around 2140. Whether the fee market grows enough by then is one of the big open questions in Bitcoin. The Mining rabbit hole and the Bitcoin and Energy rabbit hole also call it an open question.

8. The Next One

Halving 5 will happen at block 1,050,000. As of October 2026 the estimate is mid-April 2028, and it will keep moving as real block times come in.

What you can expect:

• Subsidy drops from 3.125 to 1.5625 BTC.
• Annual issuance drops from ~164,250 BTC to ~82,125 BTC.
• Bitcoin's inflation rate halves, from about 0.8% to about 0.4% a year, well under the 1.5 to 1.7% that gold's above-ground supply grew in 2025.
• A miner consolidation event. Marginal operations close, efficient ones survive.
• A media moment. Halvings get covered. Each one slightly less novel than the last.
• Price talk. Expect plenty of predictions about what the halving will do to the price. Four past halvings are too few to back any of them, and nobody can tell you what happens after the fifth.

What you don't need to worry about:

• The halving "not happening." It happens at block 1,050,000, deterministically, no matter what.
• The schedule "being changed." Raising the cap or adding issuance would only stick if node operators chose to run the new rules, and as of October 2026 no proposal to do that has even been assigned a BIP number. The Supply Schedule rabbit hole explains why it is unlikely.
• The network "breaking." Networks don't break on halvings. They sometimes wobble, then re-equilibrate.

Pro tip: Halvings are a great moment to explain Bitcoin to people who haven't paid attention. The narrative is concrete (number goes down), the block height is known years in advance, and the structural claim is verifiable. Use the moment. Just don't promise anyone what comes after.