Mining is likely to get 4.0% easier.
Every 2,016 blocks, Bitcoin resets how hard mining is so that blocks keep arriving about every 10 minutes. Lately they have taken 11.6 minutes on average, so the network will make mining easier.
The date is an estimate based on recent block times, and so is the change: it moves as blocks arrive.
Difficulty over the past two years
Each step is one adjustment, every 2,016 blocks. The scale starts at zero. Data from mempool.space.
Recent adjustments
Questions about difficulty
What is mining difficulty?
A measure of how hard it is to find a new block. Miners make guess after guess, and a block only counts if its fingerprint, called a hash, falls below a target. The difficulty compares that target with the one Bitcoin started with. Its first blocks had a difficulty of 1, so the figure is how many times as many guesses a block takes now, on average: about 148.4 trillion.
Sources: Bitcoin wiki, Bitcoin developer guide.
Why does it change every 2,016 blocks?
Bitcoin aims for a block every 10 minutes. Every 2,016 blocks, two weeks at that pace, the network measures how long those blocks actually took. If they came faster, it raises the difficulty in proportion; if slower, it lowers it, so the next 2,016 blocks should take about two weeks. One adjustment can make mining at most four times harder or four times easier.
Sources: Bitcoin developer guide, Bitcoin Core’s adjustment code.
Does the difficulty affect my payment?
Not its fee. What it changes is the pace of blocks. When miners add computing power between adjustments, blocks come a little faster than every 10 minutes, and when they switch some off, a little slower, until the next adjustment brings the pace back towards 10 minutes. A waiting payment still needs a fee rate high enough for the next blocks.