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<p class="crumb"><a href="/guides">Guides</a> / How fees work</p>

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      <h1><span class="grad">How transaction fees work</span></h1>
      <p class="lede">Every transaction pays a small fee to the miner who includes it. The fee is what decides how quickly you confirm, and on testnet you can experiment with it for free.</p>
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    <p class="toc-title">On this page</p>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="#what">What a fee is</a></li>
      <li><a href="#rate">Fee rate vs total fee</a></li>
      <li><a href="#mempool">The mempool</a></li>
      <li><a href="#estimate">Fee estimation</a></li>
      <li><a href="#testnet">Fees on testnet</a></li>
      <li><a href="#monero">Monero fees</a></li>
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    <h2 id="what">What a fee is <a class="anchor" tabindex="-1" href="#what" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
    <p>A fee pays the miner to include your transaction in a block, and it discourages spam. On UTXO chains like Bitcoin and Litecoin there's no separate "fee" field. The fee is whatever's left over: <strong>inputs &minus; outputs</strong>. Anything you don't assign to an output goes to the miner. (This is why understanding <a href="/utxos">UTXOs</a> helps.)</p>

    <h2 id="rate">Fee rate vs total fee <a class="anchor" tabindex="-1" href="#rate" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
    <p>Miners care about the <strong>fee rate</strong>, the fee per unit of transaction size, priced in satoshis per virtual byte (<strong>sat/vB</strong>) on Bitcoin and Litecoin. Your <em>total</em> fee is the rate times your transaction's size. A transaction that spends many small inputs is bigger, so it costs more to send at the same rate.</p>

    <h2 id="mempool">The mempool <a class="anchor" tabindex="-1" href="#mempool" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
    <p>Broadcast transactions wait in the <strong>mempool</strong>, a holding area of unconfirmed transactions. When a miner builds a block, it picks the highest fee rates first because they earn the most. If the network is busy, low-fee transactions wait; when it's quiet, even a low fee confirms quickly.</p>

    <h2 id="estimate">Fee estimation <a class="anchor" tabindex="-1" href="#estimate" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
    <p>Wallets estimate a fee rate to hit a target confirmation time by looking at what's currently in the mempool. Pay more to confirm sooner, less to save money and wait longer. See <a href="/confirmations">how confirmations work</a>.</p>

    <h2 id="testnet">Fees on testnet <a class="anchor" tabindex="-1" href="#testnet" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
    <p>Testnet transactions follow the same fee rules, but since the coins are free, it costs nothing to experiment. Send the same payment at a high and a low fee rate and watch how much sooner one confirms. It's the cheapest way to build real intuition.</p>

    <h2 id="monero">Monero fees <a class="anchor" tabindex="-1" href="#monero" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
    <p>Monero handles fees a bit differently: rather than a sat/vB market, you choose a <strong>priority level</strong> and the protocol sets a dynamic fee. Higher priority pays more for faster inclusion. See the <a href="/monero">Monero guide</a>.</p>
    <div class="callout warn"><p class="co-title">Underpaid and stuck?</p><p>If you set the fee too low, your transaction can sit unconfirmed for a long time. See <a href="/debug-stuck-tx">debugging a stuck transaction</a> for how to rescue it with RBF or CPFP.</p></div>
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