Miner revenue keeps falling, and you probably want to know how that "shutdown price" is actually calculated. In one sentence: the most important part of calculating the shutdown price is not the Bitcoin price, but how much you actually pay for electricity.
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Why You Cannot Just Look at the Coin Price
Many people think the "shutdown price" means the coin price drops to a certain number and miners turn off. But that is not how it really works. ViaBTC's mining pool documents explain it clearly: the shutdown price is not one fixed number for everyone. It depends on what mining machine you use, how much you pay for electricity, whether you have hosting fees, cooling costs, uptime, and more. Even if two people use the same model of miner, if one person has cheaper electricity, their shutdown price will be much lower.
The real situation in 2026 is this: the average mining cost across the whole market is around 78,000 US dollars, while the Bitcoin price is hovering between 62,000 and 63,000 dollars. That means mining one Bitcoin is a real loss of more than 15,000 dollars. Based on this math, about 15% to 20% of the network's mining machines have already reached the point where they need to be shut down.
The Most Basic Shutdown Price Formula
Let us start with the simplest method. You can use it to calculate with your own miner parameters:
Shutdown coin price = daily operating cost ÷ daily Bitcoin output
For example: a mining machine uses 3 kilowatts of power per hour, and your electricity price is 0.06 dollars per kWh. The daily electricity cost is: 3 × 24 × 0.06 = 4.32 dollars. If this machine mines 0.00012 BTC per day, then its electricity-only shutdown price is 4.32 ÷ 0.00012 = 36,000 dollars.
But note that this 36,000 dollars is only the shutdown price based on pure electricity cost. In real operations, you also need to add mining pool fees, hosting fees, cooling costs, repair costs, and more. When you add all of these, the shutdown price will be much higher than the pure electricity cost.
Take a common machine like the Antminer S19 as an example. It produces about 0.0002 BTC per day. With an electricity price of 0.06 dollars per kWh, the shutdown price is already close to 85,000 dollars, which is very close to the current coin price gap.
Another Way to Measure the Shutdown Price: Hashprice
Besides calculating "at what coin price should you shut down," you can also use a unit called hashprice. Hashprice means how many dollars each unit of hashrate (1 PH/s) can earn per day.
Shutdown hashprice = daily variable cost ÷ your hashrate (PH/s)
For example, you have a 200 TH/s machine, which is 0.2 PH/s. Your daily variable cost is 6 dollars. Then the shutdown hashprice for this machine is 6 ÷ 0.2 = 30 dollars per PH per day. If the current market hashprice is below 30, this machine is losing money.
In 2026 August, the market hashprice was around 31 to 32 dollars per PH per day, which is right at the shutdown line for many older mining machines. The continued low hashprice directly explains why so many miners have shut down recently. It no longer matters much whether the Bitcoin price has gone up or not.
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You Can Calculate It Yourself Too
If you want to calculate whether your own mining machine should be turned off, it only takes three steps:
- Go to a mining pool or Hashrate Index and check your miner's current daily Bitcoin output and its profitability under the latest difficulty.
- Add up your real daily cash expenses such as electricity, hosting fees, and mining pool fees.
- Use "daily total cost ÷ daily Bitcoin output" to get your shutdown price.
If this number is higher than the current market price, your machine is losing money. If you also consider long-term miner depreciation or the opportunity cost of converting to AI data centers, the actual price level for stopping operations may be even lower than this.
How to verify this yourself: Open the Hashrate Index website and find the current "Hashprice" number on the homepage. The unit is dollars per PH per day. If you have a mining machine, check its power consumption in kW and its hashrate in TH/s. Calculate "your daily electricity cost ÷ your hashrate converted to PH/s." Compare the two numbers, and you can directly tell whether your machine is making or losing money right now. You do not need to wait for anyone else to tell you.
