Bitcoin mining calculator 2026: why a miner in Germany loses money on grid power

A bitcoin miner in Germany makes no profit in November 2026 as long as it runs on grid electricity. At the difficulty of November 3, 2026, Bitmain's air-cooled Antminer S21 XP mines bitcoin worth €7.91 a day and uses 87.5 kilowatt hours to do so. It only turns a profit up to an electricity price of 9.04 cents per kilowatt hour. Household electricity in Germany cost 36.18 cents in the first half of 2026, according to Eurostat, so the device loses €23.74 a day. Our mining calculator shows these figures for five current devices and three electricity prices, plus the formula to work it out yourself.

Bitcoin mining calculator 2026 at a glance: the key figures

• At the difficulty of 148.36 trillion on November 3, 2026, one terahash per second earns €0.0293 a day, one petahash $32.79.
• In the week to November 3, each block paid an average of 3.1432 bitcoin: 3.125 from the block reward and 0.0182 from fees.
• The five devices in our calculator only turn a profit up to an electricity price of between 7.63 and 13.72 cents per kilowatt hour.
• An Antminer S21 XP needs 23.8 years on average to mine a whole bitcoin.
• For the cost of one day's electricity you get four times as much bitcoin on the market as the device mines in the same time.
• The next halving at block 1,050,000 is expected to cut the reward to 1.5625 bitcoin in April 2028.

How bitcoin mining works technically, from proof of work to pools, is explained in our guide What is bitcoin mining?. This article is about the numbers.

Bitcoin mining calculator: revenue, power and break-even per device

For the calculator we ran the numbers for devices from Bitmain's shop using the difficulty of November 3, 2026 and a bitcoin price of €68,761. Revenue is the expected value before pool fees: it holds on average over many blocks, while on individual days it fluctuates with the pool's luck.

Bitmain quotes its prices in US dollars; we converted them to euros at the day's exchange rate, with customs, shipping and import VAT on top. The break-even point is the electricity price at which revenue and power costs are equal. Water-cooled and immersion devices need a cooling circuit or an oil bath and are built for data centres. Only the air-cooled model is an option for a socket at home, and even that draws 3.6 kilowatts around the clock, just under 32,000 kilowatt hours a year.

That is the basic problem: every device sits far below German household electricity prices and also below the commercial rate of 23.66 cents net that Eurostat reports for businesses using 20 to 499 megawatt hours a year. Bitcoin mining therefore only pays in places with very cheap power: at hydroelectric plants, at gas fields with surplus gas and at solar parks with peak power.

How to calculate bitcoin mining revenue yourself

A miner's revenue follows from three numbers: its hashrate, the network difficulty and the reward per block. The formula for expected blocks per day is: hashrate in hashes per second times 86,400 seconds, divided by difficulty times 2 to the power of 32. Multiply the result by the reward per block, currently a little over 3.14 bitcoin.

The current difficulty and the date of the next adjustment are shown by mempool.space. The service expects the next adjustment at block 975,744, currently with a drop of 2.19 percent. From your result you still deduct your pool's fee, which is usually charged as a percentage of the payout.

Mining calculator for Germany: 30 days on household, commercial and solar power

Bitcoin mining on grid power does not pay in Germany, either for households or for typical businesses. Only those who use their own solar power, giving up the feed-in tariff in return, end up slightly in the black. The example shows the Antminer S21 XP, the most efficient air-cooled device, over 30 days.

For solar power we use as the price what you forgo: the feed-in tariff of 7.70 cents that the Federal Network Agency lists for rooftop systems up to 10 kilowatts commissioned from August 2026. Even then, an S21 XP needs around 9.5 years to earn back its purchase price, and only if difficulty and price stay the same. There is also a practical problem: the device needs 87.5 kilowatt hours a day, around the clock. A solar system on a detached house only delivers that much power in the bright hours of a summer day; at night the miner runs on grid power.

What tips the balance is therefore your own electricity bill: if your unit price is above the break-even point from our mining calculator, you lose money with every hour of operation. Add noise and waste heat, because air-cooled miners are built for warehouses. The basics of photovoltaics and mining are covered in our article on bitcoin mining with solar power. How mined coins are taxed is explained in our guide to crypto mining and tax.

How long does it take to mine one bitcoin? The numbers for solo mining and pools

An Antminer S21 XP mines an average of 0.0001151 bitcoin a day. It therefore needs 23.8 years for a whole bitcoin, and the water-cooled S23 XP Hyd. still 10.7 years. The time lengthens with every upward difficulty adjustment and with every halving.

In solo mining, a device computes on its own and only receives something if it finds a block itself. At 270 terahash, the chance of that is 1 in 3.9 million per block. On average it succeeds once in 75 years, but then with the full reward of a little over 3.1 bitcoin. Solo mining is therefore a lottery with a very high electricity stake.

That is why almost all miners join a mining pool. The pool combines the computing power of many devices, finds blocks regularly and distributes the reward according to each member's share of computing power. Revenue thus becomes predictable and matches the expected value from our calculator, minus the pool fee.

What hashrate and the 2028 halving mean for the mining maths

Computing power in the bitcoin network has more than doubled in three years. On a seven-day moving average it rose, according to mempool.space, from 452 exahash per second in November 2023 to 1,069 exahash in early November 2026. Derived from the difficulty, it is currently around 1,062 exahash. Because the number of blocks is fixed, the same reward is shared across ever more computing power.

On top of that, the reward halves every 210,000 blocks. At the halving on April 20, 2024, it fell at block 840,000 from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoin. The next bitcoin halving comes at block 1,050,000. On November 3, 2026, 75,676 blocks remained until then; at ten minutes per block that point is reached in April 2028. From then on, transaction fees matter more for miners; they currently account for only 0.6 percent of revenue per block.

For any mining calculation this means: without a rising price, revenue per terahash falls over time. A device that barely pays its way today will make a loss after the next halving unless bitcoin has become significantly more expensive by then. We track how the difficulty has jumped this autumn on an ongoing basis, most recently in our bitcoin price prediction on mining difficulty.

Dogecoin mining, Litecoin and Monero in the mining calculator

Besides bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies are mined by proof of work, each with its own algorithm and hardware. That changes little in the basic calculation: here too, the electricity price decides.

Dogecoin mining and Litecoin: both coins use the Scrypt algorithm and are mined together, so one miner works for both networks at once. According to network data from Blockchair, an Antminer L9 with 16 gigahash per second and 3,360 watts produced an average of 61.7 dogecoin and 0.0204 litecoin a day on November 3, 2026, worth €5.08 in total. 81 percent of that comes from dogecoin, whose block reward is fixed at 10,000 DOGE. The L9's break-even point is 6.30 cents per kilowatt hour; on German household electricity it loses €24.10 a day. How the budget splits between the two coins is shown in our analysis of dogecoin mining and Litecoin's share.

Monero: with its RandomX algorithm, Monero deliberately relies on ordinary processors rather than specialist devices and pays out a permanent 0.6 XMR per block. Per 10 kilohash per second, at the difficulty of November 3 and a price of €540.38, that yields €0.36 a day. On German household electricity this only pays if the computer needs less than 41 extra watts for those 10 kilohash.

Kaspa and Ethereum Classic: Kaspa is now mined with dedicated ASIC devices, and Bitmain lists the coin as a separate category in its shop. For Ethereum Classic, Bitmain sells the Antminer E11 with 9.5 gigahash per second and 2,470 watts. Ethereum itself can no longer be mined since the Merge in September 2022. If you would rather rent computing power, you will find the maths and the typical contract traps in our guide to cloud mining without your own hardware.

Buying bitcoin instead of mining: what the same power costs get you on the market

For the electricity an Antminer S21 XP uses in one day on household power, you pay €31.65. For the same amount you get 0.00046 bitcoin on November 3, 2026, four times as much as the device mines in that time. With no device, no noise and no maintenance.

Advertisement: Bitpanda and Coinbase are licensed in the EU under the MiCA crypto regulation, Bitpanda by the Austrian Financial Market Authority and Coinbase by Luxembourg's CSSF. With both you can buy bitcoin by bank transfer or card and set up a savings plan. All providers with their licences, fees and security features are listed in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

Whether bought or mined: larger holdings belong in your own wallet, whose keys only you know. We compare devices for secure storage in our hardware wallet comparison.

Our view: when bitcoin mining pays in 2026

Bitcoin mining has become an industry. It pays where electricity flows at a fraction of the German household price and thousands of devices are cooled together. For private individuals in Germany, a miner is an expensive lesson: fascinating for understanding how the network is secured, but as an investment clearly worse than buying directly.

Our recommendation: before any purchase, run the numbers with your own electricity price, the current difficulty and the next halving; the formula is above. If your electricity price is above the break-even point, buying bitcoin directly is cheaper. Mining remains interesting as a way to use your own surplus power when the feed-in tariff is low and the device is already there.

Cryptocurrencies and mining involve high risks, and price and difficulty can change quickly. This guide is not investment advice. The links to Bitpanda and Coinbase are partner links; they cost you nothing extra.

(As of November 3, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)