Issuance Schedule

Bitcoin Halving History: All Halvings, Dates, and What Changed

Bitcoin's supply schedule was fixed before anyone knew whether the network would survive its first year. Every 210,000 blocks the reward paid to miners is cut in half, without a vote, an announcement, or a central bank. Four of those cuts have now happened on a live chain.

Quick Answer

Bitcoin has had four halvings: November 28, 2012 (block 210,000), July 9, 2016 (block 420,000), May 11, 2020 (block 630,000), and April 20, 2024 UTC (block 840,000). Each cut the block subsidy in half, from 50 BTC down to 3.125 BTC. The fifth halving arrives at block 1,050,000, expected around April 2028.

How the Halving Actually Works

The halving is not a policy decision made every four years. It is a single line of arithmetic in the consensus code that every node independently enforces on every block.

Every 210,000 blocks, not every four years

Bitcoin Core computes the block subsidy as 50 BTC right-shifted by the number of completed 210,000-block epochs. The four-year figure is a consequence of the ten-minute block target, not a rule in itself: 210,000 blocks × 10 minutes ≈ 3.99 years.

Height decides the date, so the date drifts

Difficulty retargets every 2,016 blocks to pull the average block interval back toward ten minutes, but hash rate grows between retargets, so blocks have historically arrived slightly fast. That is why halvings have landed weeks earlier than a naive four-year count from the previous one.

The 21 million cap is the sum of the schedule

Each epoch issues exactly half as much as the one before, so total issuance converges: 10.5M + 5.25M + 2.625M and so on. Nothing enforces 21 million separately — the cap is what the halving series adds up to.

The real ceiling is 20,999,999.9769 BTC

Subsidies are integers of satoshis and the shift operation rounds down, so a few fractional satoshis are lost at each late-stage halving. The final supply falls a little short of a round 21 million — an artifact of integer arithmetic, not a bug.

The last new bitcoin arrives around 2140

After 33 halvings, around block 6,930,000, the subsidy rounds to zero and issuance stops permanently. From that point miners are paid entirely from transaction fees — a transition the network has already rehearsed during high-fee blocks.

By 2026 more than 95% of all bitcoin that will ever exist had already been issued. The remaining coins are stretched across the next century by the same schedule that issued the first ten million in under four years.

Complete Bitcoin Halving Table

All four completed halvings, anchored by block height — the only value that is not open to interpretation. Timestamps are the UTC time recorded in each halving block.

Complete Bitcoin Halving Table
Event	Date (UTC)	Block height	Block subsidy	New BTC per day after	Price around the event
Genesis block	January 3, 2009	0	50 BTC	≈ 7,200 BTC	No market price existed
First halving	November 28, 2012, 15:24 UTC	210,000	50 → 25 BTC	≈ 3,600 BTC	≈ $12
Second halving	July 9, 2016, 16:46 UTC	420,000	25 → 12.5 BTC	≈ 1,800 BTC	≈ $650
Third halving	May 11, 2020, 19:23 UTC	630,000	12.5 → 6.25 BTC	≈ 900 BTC	≈ $8,600
Fourth halving	April 20, 2024, 00:09 UTC (April 19 in the Americas)	840,000	6.25 → 3.125 BTC	≈ 450 BTC	≈ $64,000
Fifth halving (projected)	Around April 2028	1,050,000	3.125 → 1.5625 BTC	≈ 225 BTC	Not knowable

The fourth halving is the one most often written down inconsistently. Block 840,000 was mined at 00:09 UTC on April 20, 2024 — which was still the evening of April 19 in North and South America. Sources that say "April 19" and sources that say "April 20" are describing the same block in different time zones; the block height never moves.
Prices are rounded daily figures near each halving and differ by a few percent between exchanges and data providers. They describe the environment, not an official print.
Daily issuance assumes the long-run average of about 144 blocks per day.

What Happened at Each Halving

The arithmetic was identical every time. The industry around it was unrecognizable from one halving to the next.

The First Halving: A Rule Nobody Had Tested

November 28, 2012 · Block 210,000 · 50 → 25 BTC

Bitcoin traded near $12 and mining was moving from GPUs to the first FPGA and ASIC hardware. The open question was whether cutting miner income in half overnight would drive enough machines offline to stall the chain or split it. Neither happened: hash rate held, blocks kept coming, and the schedule Satoshi wrote in 2009 executed exactly as specified. In the twelve months that followed, the price rose past $1,000 — a run that took place while Mt. Gox still handled most of the world's trading volume.

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The Second Halving: Priced In Long Before It Arrived

July 9, 2016 · Block 420,000 · 25 → 12.5 BTC

By 2016 the halving was a scheduled media event with countdown clocks. The price sat near $650 and barely moved on the day, then went sideways for months — a reminder that a publicly known supply change can be traded well in advance. The lasting effect was industrial. Halved revenue per block pushed older hardware below break-even and accelerated the concentration of mining into large, cheap-power facilities, a shift that shaped the scaling politics of the following two years.

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The Third Halving: Scarcity Meets Monetary Expansion

May 11, 2020 · Block 630,000 · 12.5 → 6.25 BTC

This halving landed two months after the March 2020 crash, while central banks were expanding balance sheets at unprecedented speed. Daily issuance dropped to about 900 BTC into a macro environment that gave the digital-scarcity argument its widest audience yet. Corporate treasury allocations began within months, and the cycle that followed produced the first sustained institutional participation in Bitcoin — along with an unusual double peak in April and November 2021.

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The Fourth Halving: A Record Set Before the Cut

April 20, 2024, 00:09 UTC · Block 840,000 · 6.25 → 3.125 BTC

Spot Bitcoin ETFs had been approved three months earlier, and in March 2024 the price passed its 2021 high for the first time — the first cycle in which a record came before the halving rather than after it. Block 840,000 itself was the most valuable block ever mined: the Runes protocol launched in that exact block, and the competition to be included pushed its fees to about 37.6 BTC, roughly twelve times the new 3.125 BTC subsidy. For a few hours, fees rather than issuance paid for Bitcoin's security — a live preview of how the network is meant to work after the last halving.

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When Is the Next Bitcoin Halving?

The fifth halving happens at block 1,050,000, when the subsidy falls to 1.5625 BTC and daily issuance drops to roughly 225 new coins.

Halving number: 5th
Trigger: Block 1,050,000
Subsidy change: 3.125 → 1.5625 BTC
Daily issuance after: ≈ 225 BTC
Estimated date: Around April 2028
Epoch progress (July 2026): Roughly 57% of the way from block 840,000 to 1,050,000

Why no one can give you an exact date

The halving is triggered by a block height, not a calendar entry. The remaining blocks will be found at whatever speed the network's hash rate produces them, and difficulty only corrects the average every 2,016 blocks. Countdown sites currently cluster their estimates between April 13 and April 19, 2028 UTC, and those estimates shift by days as hash rate changes. Any page that gives you a precise date and time for 2028 is quoting an extrapolation, not a fact.

Halvings and Price Cycles: What the Record Shows

This is a history archive, so this section reports what happened after each halving and nothing more. Read the limits below before drawing conclusions from it.

Halvings and Price Cycles: What the Record Shows
Cycle	Price around halving	Highest price before the next halving	What followed that high
After 2012 halving	≈ $12	≈ $1,200 (late 2013)	Fell to roughly $165 by January 2015
After 2016 halving	≈ $650	≈ $19,500 (December 2017)	Fell to roughly $3,200 by December 2018
After 2020 halving	≈ $8,600	≈ $69,000 (November 2021)	Fell to roughly $15,800 by November 2022
After 2024 halving	≈ $64,000	≈ $125,000 (October 2025)	A sharp drawdown began; the epoch is still running

What the four cycles do and do not tell us

The size of each post-halving advance has been smaller than the last. Measured from halving-day price to the highest print before the following halving, the four cycles run roughly 100×, 30×, 8×, and 2×.
In the first three cycles the high arrived twelve to eighteen months after the halving. In the fourth, a record was set in March 2024 — one month before the halving — which had not happened in any earlier cycle.
Each of the first three highs was followed by a drawdown of roughly 70–85%, spread over about a year.
Every cycle also contained large non-halving events: the Mt. Gox failure, the 2017 ICO boom, pandemic-era monetary policy, the 2022 exchange collapses, and the 2024 spot-ETF launches. No method separates the halving's contribution from these.
The subsidy change is public years in advance. Anything markets can anticipate can also be priced before it happens, which is one reason the 2016 halving passed with almost no price reaction on the day.
Four observations is not a statistical sample. Any pattern drawn from them has an effective sample size of four, spread across four completely different market structures.

Not investment advice

Everything above is a record of past events. Historical patterns do not guarantee future repetition, and this page makes no forecast about the price of bitcoin before, during, or after any future halving. Nothing here is investment, financial, or trading advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Bitcoin halvings have there been?

Four. They occurred at block 210,000 (November 28, 2012), block 420,000 (July 9, 2016), block 630,000 (May 11, 2020), and block 840,000 (April 20, 2024 UTC). The block subsidy has fallen from 50 BTC to 25, 12.5, 6.25, and now 3.125 BTC per block.

When is the next Bitcoin halving?

At block 1,050,000, when the subsidy drops from 3.125 to 1.5625 BTC. Estimates currently point to around April 2028, but the exact date cannot be known: the event is triggered by block height, and the remaining blocks will be produced at whatever rate the network's hash rate delivers. Projections shift by days as conditions change.

What happens when a Bitcoin halving occurs?

At the first block of a new epoch, every node begins enforcing a subsidy half the size of the previous one. Miners who include a larger reward have their blocks rejected. Nothing else changes: transactions, fees, difficulty, and the 21 million cap all behave exactly as before. The only immediate effect is that new supply per block is cut in half.

Why does Bitcoin halve at all?

Satoshi Nakamoto needed a way to distribute coins without a central issuer while guaranteeing a fixed final supply. A subsidy that halves every 210,000 blocks does both: it front-loads issuance to bootstrap early mining, then decays geometrically so that total issuance converges on a known ceiling. The schedule also transfers miner income from new supply to transaction fees over time.

Was the 2024 halving on April 19 or April 20?

Both dates describe the same block. Block 840,000 was mined at 00:09 UTC on April 20, 2024, which was 8:09 pm on April 19 in New York. Publishers in the Americas usually date it April 19; UTC-based sources say April 20. Citing the block height avoids the ambiguity entirely.

Does halving affect Bitcoin miners?

Directly and immediately. Revenue per block from new issuance is cut in half overnight while electricity and hardware costs are unchanged, so the least efficient machines fall below break-even and are switched off or replaced. Historically hash rate has recovered as efficiency improved and inefficient capacity was retired. Transaction fees partly offset the cut and become more important with each halving — at block 840,000 fees briefly exceeded the subsidy by more than ten times.

What happens after the last bitcoin is mined?

Around the year 2140, after 33 halvings, the subsidy rounds down to zero and no new bitcoin is created. The network keeps running; miners are then paid entirely from transaction fees. Whether fee revenue alone will fund enough security is an open question in Bitcoin research, and it is the main long-term argument against the fixed-supply design.

Will there be exactly 21 million bitcoin?

Slightly fewer. Because subsidies are calculated in whole satoshis using integer division that rounds down, the series sums to about 20,999,999.9769 BTC. Coins sent to unspendable addresses or lost keys reduce the effective supply further, though those coins remain recorded on the chain.