Why is my Bitcoin transaction stuck in the mempool?
It was sent but its fee rate is lower than miners are taking right now, so payments that pay more go first. It can wait, be sped up, or be dropped after about two weeks.
In the mempool means sent but not yet in a block
A payment in the mempool has been sent to the Bitcoin network and is waiting for a miner to put it in a block. Each node keeps its own list of these waiting payments, called its mempool. So “stuck in the mempool” means the payment is valid and was broadcast, but it has no confirmations yet. Look up the transaction ID on UTXOHub: while it waits, its page says roughly how many transactions are ahead of it in the queue, and the page updates when it confirms.
Look up your paymentWhy it is waiting: other payments pay more
A block has limited space, so miners fill it with the payments that pay the most for the space they use. The Electrum wallet’s help puts it simply: “miners prioritize transactions that pay the highest fees.” What counts is the fee rate, in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB), not the total fee. If your payment’s fee rate is below what the next blocks are taking, it waits, and new payments that pay more keep joining ahead of it. When the network is busy the queue gets longer; when it is quiet, miners reach the cheaper payments. UTXOHub’s mempool page shows the fee rate each of the next blocks needs and whether the queue is growing or shrinking.
See the queue right nowCompare current Bitcoin feesWait, or speed it up
If nothing is urgent, waiting is the simplest option: Electrum’s help says that “eventually, your transaction will either be confirmed or cancelled. This might take several days.” To go faster, the sender may be able to replace it with a version that pays a higher fee (replace by fee, often a button called Speed up or Bump fee), which gets a new transaction ID. The receiver, or the sender if the payment returns change to them, can spend the waiting coins on with a higher fee, called child pays for parent, so miners take both together. Which of these you can do depends on the wallet; an exchange or payment app sets the fee itself, and you usually can’t change it there. Neither method guarantees a confirmation time.
How to speed up a stuck transactionCan a Bitcoin transaction be cancelled?How long a payment can stay in the mempool
Bitcoin Core, the original Bitcoin software, keeps a waiting payment for up to two weeks (336 hours) by default, then removes it from its mempool. It also gives waiting payments at most 300 MB of memory. When that fills, it removes the payments with the lowest fee rate first and raises the lowest fee rate it will accept, as its release notes describe. Since Bitcoin Core 29.1 a node on default settings accepts payments paying as little as 0.1 sat/vB, but the release notes warn that payments this cheap “are not guaranteed to propagate or confirm” until most nodes have upgraded. Nodes can change all of these settings, so different nodes may hold different payments.
When cheap payments are droppedIf it drops out, the coins don’t vanish
A payment that drops out of the mempool was never confirmed, so the coins never left the sender’s wallet. But being dropped by one node is not a cancellation: other nodes may still hold it, and the sender’s wallet may broadcast it again, so it can still confirm until another transaction spending the same coins confirms. Don’t send a second, separate payment just because the first one has gone quiet, or both could confirm. The safe way to send again is a replacement that spends the same coins, so only one of the two can ever confirm. Some wallets also let you abandon a payment once no node holds it: Bitcoin Core’s abandon command frees the coins so they can be spent again, and its help says it “can be used to replace ‘stuck’ or evicted transactions.”
Bitcoin transaction not found: what to checkReferences
- Electrum, “Frequently Asked Questions”.
- Bitcoin Core, “Opt-in RBF FAQ”.
- Bitcoin Core, “Package Mempool Accept”.
- Bitcoin Core, “mempool_options.h (DEFAULT_MEMPOOL_EXPIRY_HOURS)”.
- Bitcoin Core, “Bitcoin Core 0.12.0 Release Notes”.
- Bitcoin Core, “Bitcoin Core 29.1 (released 4 September 2025)”.
- Bitcoin Core, “abandontransaction (30.0.0 RPC)”.