BTC: Confirmation Time by Fee Rate (Median)

Included with Plus.

For each fee-rate band, the median time transactions confirmed each day spent waiting in the mempool, in minutes.

Why use it. It shows what a fee actually bought: how long transactions paying each rate really waited, measured on the transactions themselves rather than estimated. How to read it. Lower lines confirm faster. Bands far apart mean fee rates mattered that day; lines bunched together mean nearly any fee was mined quickly. A band needs 30 transactions in a day to be drawn.

Calculation. From the first capture that held each transaction to the arrival of its block at our node, for every transaction confirmed that day that our captures saw waiting. Half the transactions in a band waited less than the median. Each transaction is ranked by its own fee rate, so a parent paid for by its child counts in its own low band; a transaction mined before any capture saw it is left out, and so is one first captured right after a gap of more than five minutes. From the snapshots our mempool collector takes of our own Bitcoin node's mempool, about once a minute, from 3 October 2026; no earlier values are reconstructed. One node's view: other nodes hold slightly different transactions, and a transaction that arrives and is mined between two snapshots is not observed.