Bitcoin difficulty adjustment countdown
Current height: block 968,272 of 969,696 (epoch started at block 967,680) · updated September 23, 2026
What is the difficulty adjustment, and why does it exist?
Bitcoin targets one block every 10 minutes on average, but the real hashrate mining the network keeps changing. Every 2,016 blocks (roughly two weeks), the protocol looks at how long that batch of blocks actually took and adjusts the mining difficulty up or down so the pace returns to ~10 minutes per block. It's the mechanism that keeps Bitcoin's issuance schedule (and its halvings) on a predictable rhythm regardless of how much hashrate joins or leaves the network.
How the estimate is calculated
We reproduce Bitcoin Core's actual formula (CalculateNextWorkRequired): the real timespan of a closed adjustment period is the time of its last block minus the time of its first block, measured over 2,015 intervals between the period's 2,016 blocks, not 2,016 (a historical quirk of the reference implementation, not a bug in this page). That timespan is capped to at most 4x longer or 4x shorter than the 2-week target, and the new difficulty is old difficulty × 1,209,600 seconds ÷ that (possibly capped) timespan. For an epoch still in progress, we extrapolate: we take the real average time per block observed so far this epoch (currently 10.3 minutes/block, vs. the 10-minute target) and project it across the full period.
With 29.4% of this epoch already mined (592 of 2,016 blocks), this estimate is reasonably stable, as a rough and informal guide, but it's still an extrapolation of the pace observed so far, not a fact until the period closes at block 969,696.
Current difficulty and block pace
Current difficulty: 132.76T. Real average pace this epoch: 10.3 minutes per block (target: 10 minutes), implying an estimated network hashrate of roughly 923.85 EH/s.
Past adjustments
| Date | Block | Difficulty | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-19 | 967,680 | 132.76T | +4.16% |
| 2026-09-05 | 965,664 | 127.45T | +1.31% |
| 2026-08-23 | 963,648 | 125.81T | -1.31% |
| 2026-08-08 | 961,632 | 127.48T | +0.99% |
| 2026-07-25 | 959,616 | 126.23T | -0.74% |
| 2026-07-11 | 957,600 | 127.17T | -5.00% |
| 2026-06-27 | 955,584 | 133.87T | +7.15% |
| 2026-06-14 | 953,568 | 124.93T | -10.09% |
More on our own node
This countdown comes from the same live data as:
- Our own node status and hashrate history
- The halving countdown
- Today's Bitcoin fees, which move with mining pace
This page describes a protocol mechanism; it is not financial advice and makes no price predictions of any kind.
Last updated: September 23, 2026