Choosing the right mempool fee is a balance between cost and confirmation speed. Pay too little and your transaction may sit in the mempool for hours or days. Pay too much and you waste money. A good fee estimator analyzes current mempool conditions in real time to recommend the optimal sat/vB rate for your target confirmation time.
Fee estimation works by examining the current distribution of transactions in the mempool, sorted by sat/vB rate. The estimator identifies the minimum fee rate needed to be included in the next 1, 3, or 6 blocks, then adds a small buffer to account for new transactions arriving before your target block is mined.
Priority tiers as of 2026: High priority (next 1-2 blocks, ~10-20 minutes) typically requires 10-50 sat/vB during normal conditions and 100-500+ sat/vB during congestion. Medium priority (30-60 minutes) uses 5-20 sat/vB. Low priority (several hours) can be as low as 1-5 sat/vB during quiet weekends.
Priority tiers as of 2026: High priority (next 1-2 blocks, ~10-20 minutes) typically requires 10-50 sat/vB during normal conditions and 100-500+ sat/vB during congestion. Medium priority (30-60 minutes) uses 5-20 sat/vB. Low priority (several hours) can be as low as 1-5 sat/vB during quiet weekends.
Fee recommendations update every few seconds based on live mempool data. For non-urgent transactions, using low priority on weekends — when the mempool typically clears — can save 80% or more compared to peak hours.
To calculate your total transaction fee: multiply your transaction size in virtual bytes (vB) by the sat/vB rate. A typical 1-input 2-output SegWit transaction is ~140 vB. At 15 sat/vB that equals 2,100 sats. At $40,000/BTC that is $0.84. Taproot transactions can be even smaller, further reducing your cost.
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