Bitcoin Mining Difficulty
Current difficulty
132.72 T
-0.03%at the last adjustment
In effect since Oct 3, 2026 · one value per 2,016-block epoch
Bitcoin's mining difficulty is 132.72 T as of Oct 15, 2026, after the adjustment on Oct 3, 2026 cut it 0.03%. The next adjustment comes at block 971,712, 117 blocks from now: about 19 hours at the recent pace of 9.80 minutes per block.
- All-time high
- 155.97 T
- Oct 29, 2025
- From all-time high
- -14.91%
- Previous epoch
- 132.76 T
- Sep 19, 2026
- Next adjustment
- Block 971,712
- 117 blocks left, about 19 hours
How it’s calculated
Every 2,016 blocks, difficulty re-tunes to keep blocks about 10 minutes apart.
At the end of each epoch, every node divides the 1,209,600-second target (2,016 blocks × 600 seconds) by the time the epoch actually took, and scales difficulty by that ratio, capped at a 4× move either way. The last epoch took 14.01 days instead of 14, so the adjustment cut difficulty 0.03%. Difficulty has no unit: the T here means trillion. Our node records every block's difficulty, and the chart plots one point per epoch, dated by its first block.
What the shape means
It climbs when hashrate grows and drops when miners leave.
Log is the default: difficulty has gone from 1 in 2009 to 132.72 T, and only a log scale shows both ends. Switch to Lin to see the size of recent moves. The largest single cut on record is -27.94%, on Jul 3, 2021, after China ordered its miners to shut down.
Difficulty as a security budget
It sets how much work each block costs, and so what rewriting history would cost.
Nodes follow the chain with the most accumulated work, and each block’s share of that work is set by its difficulty. To rewrite recent blocks, an attacker has to redo that work faster than honest miners extend the chain, which means outspending all of them on hardware and electricity. As difficulty climbs, so does that bill.