Bitcoin Block Reward by Year

How Bitcoin block reward works

Roughly every 10 minutes a new Bitcoin block gets mined, and whoever wins the proof-of-work race walks away with the block reward = subsidy + transaction fees. The subsidy is the piece the protocol hands out, and it gets cut in half every 210,000 blocks, which works out to about 4 years: 2009: 50 BTC, 2012: 25 BTC, 2016: 12.5 BTC, 2020: 6.25 BTC, 2024: 3.125 BTC, ~2028: 1.5625 BTC. Fees come from users who want their transactions prioritized, and they make up a bigger and bigger slice of the reward as the subsidy keeps shrinking. Supply is capped at 21 million BTC, and the last fraction of a satoshi gets mined somewhere around 2140. To put numbers on it: with the 2025 subsidy of 3.125 BTC and roughly 0.3 BTC of average fees per block, a miner pulls in about 3.4 BTC per block, which is around 490 BTC a day across the whole network.

Applications

Mining economics, where you estimate gross daily revenue per TH/s of hashrate. ASIC ROI, where you project payback time for an Antminer S21 or Whatsminer M60 with the next halving in mind. Exchanges like Mercado Bitcoin, Foxbit and Binance Brasil run supply-side analysis on it. There's reserve forecasting for proof-of-reserves audits, and plenty of academic work on Bitcoin's monetary policy and stock-to-flow.

FAQ

Is the reward just the subsidy? No. Reward = subsidy + fees. Right now the subsidy does most of the heavy lifting, but over the next few decades fees will turn into the main thing miners earn.

Why 21 million BTC? That number is just where the geometric series of subsidies lands once you halve them every 210,000 blocks. Nobody wrote a separate rule for the cap; it falls straight out of the halving schedule.

What happens after 2140? The subsidy hits zero and fees are all that's left to pay miners. From that point on, whether the network stays secure comes down to having a fee market on-chain that can actually sustain it.