Bitcoin Block Interval
Latest complete epoch
600 s
+4.17%vs previous epoch
Epoch ended Oct 3, 2026 · 600 s target · one value per 2,016-block epoch
Bitcoin's block interval, often called block time, averaged 10.0 minutes (600 seconds) in the difficulty epoch that ended on Oct 3, 2026, right on the 10-minute target. In the past year, 10 of 26 epochs ran faster than the target.
- Last two epochs
- 588 s
- 9.80 minutes per block
- Slowest epoch
- 1,780 s
- Sep 4, 2009
- Fastest epoch
- 144 s
- Jul 16, 2010
- All-time average
- 578 s
How it’s measured
The time between the first blocks of two epochs, divided by 2,016.
For each 2,016-block difficulty epoch we take the timestamp of its first block on our node, subtract the previous epoch's, and divide by 2,016. A single block's timestamp is noisy, because miners set it within a window of a few hours, and averaging a whole epoch smooths that out. Each point is dated the day its epoch ended, so the epoch in progress is not on the chart yet.
What to look for
Under 600 s, hashrate ran ahead of difficulty. Over 600 s, it fell behind.
An epoch under 600 s ends with a difficulty increase and one over 600 s with a cut, in proportion to the gap: the latest epoch's 600 s works out to about +0.0%. Across every epoch since 2009 the average is 578 s, under target, because hashrate has mostly grown. Long stretches above target mark miners switching off: after China ordered its miners to shut down in 2021, the epoch that ended on Jul 3, 2021 averaged 833 s (13.9 minutes).
Why the clock is hard to game
Each block’s time must be later than the median of the 11 before it.
Nodes reject a block whose timestamp is not later than the median of the previous 11 blocks, or that is more than two hours ahead of the node’s own clock. That gives a single miner slack on one block, not control over an epoch: two hours spread across 2,016 blocks is under 4 seconds per block. Bending the average further would take a majority of hashrate acting together over several epochs, the attack known as time warp.