What Is the Bitcoin Halving? Every Halving Date, Block Height and the Supply Schedule

The Bitcoin halving is the cut in the reward for mining a block, set in Bitcoin's code to happen every 210,000 blocks, which halves the pace of new issuance.

Every new bitcoin is created as a reward to the miner who adds a block to the chain, and the size of that reward falls by half on a fixed schedule. This page covers what exactly is halved, every halving so far with its block height and time from the blockchain itself, why the dates drift, when the next one falls by simple arithmetic, how the schedule ends, and what four past episodes can and cannot show. It is descriptive throughout.

What gets halved

A miner who adds a block is paid in two ways: the block subsidy, which is new bitcoin created by that block, and the transaction fees paid by the users whose transactions it includes. The halving cuts only the subsidy. Fees are set by users bidding for space in blocks and are not part of the schedule.

The rule sits in a short function in Bitcoin Core, the main node software. It divides the block's height (its position in the chain) by 210,000 to count how many halvings have happened, then halves a starting subsidy of 50 bitcoin that many times. Block 839,999 paid a subsidy of 6.25 bitcoin and block 840,000 paid 3.125, with nothing in between. For the background on the network and its 21 million total, see what Bitcoin is.

Every halving so far

The times below are the timestamps recorded in each block, in UTC. At the 10-minute target a day holds 144 blocks, which gives the new-issuance figure.

The fourth halving fell just after midnight UTC, which was still the evening of 19 April in the Americas, so both dates appear in reports.

Why halvings do not land on a fixed date

The schedule counts blocks, not days. Blocks are found by trial and error, and the network resets the difficulty only every 2,016 blocks, so when more computing power joins, blocks arrive faster than every 10 minutes until the next reset catches up. Measured from the block timestamps, the gap between halvings was 3.61 years from the first to the second, 3.84 years from the second to the third, and 3.94 years from the third to the fourth. Blocks averaged 9.87 minutes over the 210,000 blocks between the third and fourth halvings. The "every four years" shorthand is a rounding of this.

The next halving

The fifth halving falls at block 1,050,000, when the subsidy drops from 3.125 to 1.5625 bitcoin. Block 969,440 was mined at 10:28 UTC on 1 October 2026, leaving 80,560 blocks to go. At exactly 10 minutes a block that is about 559 days, which lands around 12 April 2028. At the 9.95-minute average seen since the fourth halving it would come a few days earlier. Both are arithmetic on block times, and the real date moves with the pace of mining.

How the schedule ends

Each halving cuts the subsidy in half, and the code works in satoshis, the smallest unit (one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin), dropping any fraction. After 32 halvings the subsidy is down to 1 satoshi, and at the 33rd, at block 6,930,000, it reaches zero. At 10 minutes a block that is around the year 2140. All the subsidies added together come to 20,999,999.9769 bitcoin, which is the source of the 21 million figure.

The halvings already behind it account for most of the supply. By block 969,440 the schedule had released about 20.09 million bitcoin, roughly 95.7 percent of the total. Each period between later halvings adds less new bitcoin than the one before, and once the subsidy reaches zero, miners would be paid only through fees.

What past halvings can and cannot show

There have been four halvings, and that is too few to separate the halving's effect from everything else happening at the time. Each one also arrived on a date that had been public for years, because the schedule is in the code.

The fourth halving shows the problem. It came three months after the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved the listing and trading of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded products on 10 January 2024 (see how to read spot Bitcoin ETF flows). Any account of what the halving did to the price has to separate it from the new funds, from interest rates and from everything else moving markets that year, and four episodes do not allow that. This page makes no claim about the price after any halving, past or future.

What Kresmion shows, and what it does not

Kresmion does not track the chain's block height, mining difficulty, hash rate or miner revenue; the block figures on this page come from the block headers recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain. What Kresmion records is the market around Bitcoin: perpetual futures open interest and funding rates on its crypto derivatives pages, and a single-venue liquidation feed on its crypto overview desk, all of which open with a free account (see what a perpetual futures contract is), and a free research page for IBIT, BlackRock's spot Bitcoin fund, with its SEC filings and the 13F positions reported by the managers Kresmion tracks.

Honest limitations

Block timestamps are set by the miner of each block and can differ from the real time by minutes or more, so the times and the averages are approximate. The next-halving date is arithmetic on an assumed block pace, not a schedule anyone publishes. The supply totals are computed from the subsidy rule and overstate the bitcoin that can actually be spent, for reasons that include the genesis block's 50 bitcoin, which can never be spent, and lost coins, which still count.

Key takeaways

Frequently asked questions

When is the next Bitcoin halving?

At block 1,050,000. From block 969,440 on 1 October 2026, the remaining 80,560 blocks take about 559 days at the 10-minute target, which points to around April 2028. The exact date depends on how fast blocks are mined between now and then.

Does the halving change transaction fees?

No. The halving cuts only the new bitcoin created with each block. Fees are paid by users competing for space in blocks and go to the miner on top of the subsidy.

What happens when all the bitcoin has been issued?

The subsidy reaches zero at block 6,930,000, around the year 2140 at the 10-minute pace. After that no new bitcoin is created, and miners are paid only through the fees on the transactions they include.

Did past halvings move the price?

Four halvings are too few to tell. Each overlapped with other large events, such as the approval of US spot Bitcoin funds three months before the April 2024 halving, and the dates were known in advance. Past episodes do not give a forecast for the next one.

Can the halving schedule change?

Only if the network's participants adopt software with a different rule. The 210,000-block interval has applied at all four halvings so far, at the block heights in the table above.

This page is information, not investment advice.

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Source: Bitcoin Core source code, block subsidy function GetBlockSubsidy (src/validation.cpp), https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validation.cpp ; Bitcoin Core consensus parameters, 210,000-block halving interval and 10-minute target (src/kernel/chainparams.cpp), https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/kernel/chainparams.cpp ; block timestamps for blocks 210,000, 420,000, 630,000, 840,000 and 969,440, as recorded in each block's header on the Bitcoin blockchain ; intervals, averages, issuance totals and the next-halving arithmetic computed by Kresmion from those timestamps and the subsidy rule ; US Securities and Exchange Commission, Statement on the Approval of Spot Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Products, 10 January 2024, https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/gensler-statement-spot-bitcoin-011023 ; Kresmion IBIT research page, https://kresmion.com/research/IBIT.

Kresmion Research.