How long does a Bitcoin transaction take?
With a high enough fee, a payment usually gets its first confirmation in about 10 minutes, and six in about an hour. A low fee can make it wait hours or days.
Seconds to appear, about 10 minutes to confirm
Once a wallet sends a payment, it reaches the network within seconds, and the receiver’s wallet can show it as pending almost straight away. It isn’t final yet. It gets its first confirmation when a miner puts it in a block, and that takes about 10 minutes on average if the fee is high enough to get into the next one. Bitcoin keeps that pace by resetting how hard mining is every 2,016 blocks, aiming for those blocks to take two weeks, which is 10 minutes each.
How long blocks are taking latelyBlocks don’t arrive on a timer
Ten minutes is an average, not a schedule. Miners find blocks by chance, so one block can come a minute after the last and the next can take more than an hour. Waiting doesn’t make the next block due: however long it has been since the last one, the next is still about 10 minutes away on average. So even a payment with a good fee can take 30 minutes or more to get its first confirmation.
Your fee decides whether it gets into the next block
Each block has limited space, and miners fill it with the payments that pay the most per unit of space, called the fee rate. If yours pays less than what others are paying right now, it waits while higher-paying payments go first. It can wait a few blocks, or hours or days when the network is busy, until there is room at its fee rate. Look up your payment on UTXOHub and its page says how soon it is likely to confirm at its fee, such as Probably within the hour, and updates as blocks arrive.
See today’s fees for the next block and the next hourHow many confirmations the receiver waits for
Each block after the one with your payment adds a confirmation, so each one takes about another 10 minutes on average. Six confirmations take about an hour, sometimes much more. Whoever receives the payment decides how many to wait for. An exchange or shop usually states its number on its deposit page, so the time until it shows your bitcoin depends on that number as well as on the network.
How many confirmations does a payment need?Time before an exchange or app sends it
If you’re withdrawing from an exchange or another service, the clock on the network starts only when the service sends the payment. Before that, a withdrawal can sit as pending or processing while the service runs its own checks, and it has no transaction ID yet. Only that service can say when it will send it.
Withdrawal pending with no transaction IDIf it’s taking much longer
A payment with a low fee can wait for days. The sender can often raise its fee from the wallet that sent it, and the receiver can sometimes spend the waiting bitcoin on with a higher fee. If nobody does, nodes running Bitcoin Core drop a payment by default after it has waited two weeks. That doesn’t cancel it: any wallet or node can send it out again, and it can still confirm. Don’t send a second payment just because the first is slow, because both could confirm.
How to speed up a stuck Bitcoin transactionLightning payments take seconds
Payments over the Lightning Network, a system built on top of Bitcoin, are near-instant and don’t wait for a block. A Bitcoin explorer such as UTXOHub can’t show an individual Lightning payment, so if your wallet says it paid by Lightning, check the payment in that wallet instead.
References
- Bitcoin.org, “Frequently Asked Questions”.
- Bitcoin Developer Guide, “Block Chain”.
- Russell O’Connor, “Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?”.
- Bitcoin Developer Guide, “Payment Processing”.
- Gemini Cryptopedia, “Why Is My Crypto Withdrawal Pending?”.
- Bitcoin Core, “mempool_options.h (DEFAULT_MEMPOOL_EXPIRY_HOURS)”.
- Lightning Labs, “Payment Channels”.