Lightning Network Fee Calculator

Fee Economics Comparison

A Lightning Network fee is the small amount each routing node charges for forwarding your payment. Every node sets two numbers. The base fee is a fixed charge per forwarded payment, usually between 0 and 1 satoshi. The proportional fee is a share of the amount you send, quoted in parts per million (ppm). Many nodes charge somewhere between 1 and 1,000 ppm, which is 0.0001% to 0.1% of the payment.

Here is a worked example. You send 100,000 sats through 3 routing nodes, and each charges a 1 sat base fee plus 100 ppm. Each hop costs 1 sat plus 10 sats, so the total is about 33 sats. The same payment on-chain pays for block space instead of for the amount. A simple transaction of about 140 virtual bytes costs roughly 1,400 sats at 10 sat/vB and 14,000 sats at 100 sat/vB, and busy periods in recent years have pushed rates well above that.

A useful rule of thumb: Lightning is usually cheaper for everyday amounts, roughly up to about $1,000, because its fee grows with the amount while an on-chain fee depends only on transaction size in bytes. As the payment gets larger, the proportional part of the Lightning fee grows, and finding a route with enough liquidity gets harder.

On-chain is often the better choice for large transfers, for moving coins into cold storage, for a first payment to someone new, or when a Lightning route keeps failing. The table below uses the example rates from the section above: 3 hops at 1 sat plus 100 ppm for Lightning, and a 140 vB transaction at 10 to 100 sat/vB for on-chain. Enter your own amount in the Lightning Fee Calculator above to see live numbers.

Illustrative only. Real Lightning fees depend on the nodes in your route; on-chain fees depend on mempool demand.

A routing hop is each intermediate node that passes your payment toward the recipient. If your wallet has no direct channel with the person you are paying, it finds a path through other nodes, and every node on that path adds its own base and proportional fee.

More hops usually mean a higher total fee, but they also give your wallet more possible paths, which raises the chance that the payment succeeds. Most payments travel through a handful of hops. A payment over a direct channel has zero hops and no routing fee at all, but you need an open channel with that recipient first. Opening and closing a channel are on-chain transactions, so check current rates with the Bitcoin Transaction Fee Calculator before you open one.

First, open a direct channel with a merchant, exchange or friend you pay often. Payments over that channel skip routing fees completely.

Second, consider a wallet run with a Lightning Service Provider (LSP). Phoenix and Wallet of Satoshi are common examples: they manage channels and routing for you, although each charges its own service fees and custodial wallets hold your coins for you. This is a neutral example, not a recommendation.

Third, if your wallet lets you set a maximum fee, keep it low and retry later if a payment fails. Node operators adjust their fees, and a cheaper route may appear.

Fourth, combine small payments into one where you can. Each payment pays its own base fee on every hop, so one payment of 50,000 sats costs less than ten payments of 5,000 sats. To check what a fee means in dollars or another currency, use the Bitcoin Converter, and see how network activity is trending with the On-Chain Metrics Calculator.