Ethereum Gas Fees Statistics 2026: Gwei, Costs and Layer 2

Ethereum gas fees averaged 0.8993 gwei on September 19, 2026, down 27.99% from 1.249 gwei one year earlier, according to Etherscan data compiled by YCharts. At roughly 0.5 gwei, the April 2026 average, a basic ETH transfer costs under a cent, per the Ethereum Foundation’s own builder guidance. The Ethereum gas fees statistics that follow draw on Etherscan, L2BEAT, and growthepie readings captured through late September.

Three protocol upgrades did most of that work: Dencun in March 2024, Pectra in May 2025, and Fusaka in December 2025. Rollups now carry about 95% of Ethereum’s transactions, and L1 typically runs well below its block target. The figures below cover the daily gwei series, the dollar cost of each common operation, what Layer 2 networks pay Ethereum for blockspace, and the blob fee market that now sets rollup economics.

Key Takeaways

• According to YCharts, Ethereum’s daily average gas price ranged from 0.4649 gwei to 1.902 gwei between August 19 and September 19, 2026, a spread wide enough that any single monthly average understates timing risk.
• An ERC-20 transfer used roughly 65,000 gas and cost about $0.076 at 0.5 gwei with ETH at roughly $2,350.
• Base Chain paid an average of $0.000035 to Ethereum per user operation across 306.40 million operations between August 21 and September 20, 2026, per L2BEAT’s on-chain cost data.
• According to growthepie, Robinhood Chain kept a 99.9% on-chain profit margin after paying Ethereum for data and settlement, against 94.7% for OP Mainnet.
• Ethereum’s blob target rose from 3 at the Dencun upgrade to 6 at Pectra, and blob-parameter-only forks now let clients raise that target between major upgrades.
• The community raised the L1 gas limit from 30 million to 60 million during 2025, and Fusaka’s EIP-7935 standardized 60 million as the new default.
• Ethereum has burned transaction base fees since August 5, 2021, when EIP-1559 activated.

Editor’s Choice

• Latest daily average, per Etherscan: 0.8993 gwei on September 19, 2026.
• ETH transfer cost: $0.025 at 0.5 gwei, using 21,000 gas.
• ERC-20 deployment cost: about $1.41, using roughly 1,200,000 gas.
• Cost spread across L2BEAT’s captured rollups: Aztec at $6.474951 per user operation against Lighter at $0.000003.
• Base Chain on-chain revenue: $58.73 million, on 508.87 GB of blob data.
• Ethereum blob throughput: 32,510 blobs a day, down 6.8% year over year.
• Top daily rent payer in growthepie’s feed: Robinhood Chain at $644.

Ethereum Gas Fees Statistics Right Now

The figures here are compiled from 12 primary sources: 1 Tier 1 source, 9 Tier 2 sources, and 2 Tier 3 sources. The Tier 3 entries were traced back to the primary data they restate. Source publication dates span 2025-12 to 2026-09. Only official protocol documentation, on-chain analytics platforms, and the datasets they publish qualified. Figures are reviewed on a rolling basis and updated when sources publish new readings.

• Gas measures the computational effort required to execute an operation on Ethereum, and the fee equals the gas used multiplied by the cost per unit of gas.
• Gas prices are quoted in gwei, and each gwei equals one-billionth of an ETH.
• Etherscan’s gas tracker showed standard gas around 0.15 gwei as of May 5, 2026, with daily averages near 0.5 gwei through April.
• Ultra Sound Money’s live dashboard read 0.1 gwei with ETH at $2,582 on September 20, 2026.
• Costs move with ETH price, gas price, and contract complexity.
• The fee is paid whether the transaction succeeds or fails.

Source: Etherscan via YCharts, Ultra Sound Money, September 2026

The practical consequence is that a gwei quote on its own no longer tells a user much. Two readings five days apart can differ by a factor of four while the dollar cost of the same swap moves by pennies.

Ethereum Average Daily Gas Price Over the Past Month

• August 29, 2026 printed 0.4649 gwei.
• August 24, 2026 printed 1.902 gwei.
• September 18, 2026 printed 0.934 gwei, and September 17 printed 0.8043 gwei.
• September 15, 2026 broke above one gwei at 1.133 gwei.
• According to the Ethereum Foundation, gwei readings can swing widely inside a normal month while the dollar cost barely moves.

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What is the average gas fee at Ethereum?

Ethereum’s average gas price was 0.8993 gwei on September 19, 2026, against 0.9340 gwei the day before. On the Ethereum Foundation’s published gas math, a 0.5 gwei average puts a plain ETH transfer at $0.025, so a typical day in this range costs single-digit cents rather than dollars.

Recent Developments

• September 20, 2026: growthepie’s rent-paid feed ranked Robinhood Chain, Base Chain and World Chain as the top three chains by daily rent paid to Ethereum, with Robinhood Chain at $644.
• September 19, 2026: Ethereum’s daily average gas price closed at 0.8993 gwei, a 27.99% decline from the same day a year earlier.
• September 2026: Ethereum blob submissions ran at a 7-day rolling average of 32,510 a day, down 17% over 30 days.
• August 24, 2026: The daily average spiked to 1.902 gwei in the Etherscan series.
• May 5, 2026: Etherscan’s gas tracker showed standard gas around 0.15 gwei.
• April 14, 2026: growthepie documented MegaETH selecting EigenDA over Ethereum blobs for data availability.

What an Ethereum Transaction Costs in Dollars

• The Ethereum Foundation publishes illustrative gas math for builders: 0.5 gwei, the April 2026 average, with ETH at roughly $2,350.
• Those figures are examples rather than guarantees, and costs move with ETH price, gas price, and contract complexity.
• A basic ETH transfer costs under a cent at that gas level, with typical recent days landing in the low single-digit cents.
• The fee is charged whether the transaction succeeds or fails, so a reverted swap still pays its gas.
• Mainnet fees are now low enough that many apps can sensibly run on mainnet.

Wallet software hides this arithmetic behind a single estimate, which is why the gwei figure a user sees in MetaMask wallet data rarely matches the dollar figure they remember from the last cycle.

How much ETH do I need for gas fees?

At 0.5 gwei and ETH at roughly $2,350, a transfer costs $0.025 and a swap costs $0.21. A balance covering a few dollars of ETH therefore funds dozens of ordinary interactions, though costs move with ETH price, gas price, and contract complexity, so heavy contract deployment needs more headroom.

Gas Used by Common Ethereum Operations

• An ETH transfer requires 21,000 units of gas.
• An ERC-20 transfer uses roughly 65,000 gas and an approve call roughly 46,000 gas.
• A swap uses roughly 180,000 gas, and an ERC-20 deployment uses roughly 1,200,000 gas.
• EIP-7825 caps any single transaction at approximately 16.78 million gas, which large deployments and monolithic multicalls now have to fit inside.
• Fusaka’s EIP-7935 standardized a 60 million block gas limit as the new default.

By the numbers: The Ethereum Foundation puts an ERC-20 deploy at roughly 1,200,000 gas against 21,000 for a plain transfer, so the same gwei price produces a $1.41 bill or a $0.025 one. Gas consumption, not the gas price, drives most of the variance a user sees.

Layer 2 Rollup Costs Paid to Ethereum

• L2BEAT’s on-chain cost figures track the fees Layer 2 networks pay Ethereum for posting transaction data, proofs, and state updates, not the fees users pay directly.
• Base Chain’s $0.000035 per-user operation is split into blobs at $0.000005, compute at $0.000002, and overhead at $0.000028.
• Arbitrum One spent $0.000043 of its $0.000056 per-user operation on compute.
• OP Mainnet split $0.000054 into compute at $0.000022, overhead at $0.000025, and blobs at $0.000006.
• Calldata came in below $0.000001 per user operation for Base Chain, OP Mainnet, and Arbitrum One.
• Scroll paid $0.002869, and Arbitrum Nova paid $0.013839 per user operation over the same window.

The composition is the story rather than the totals. Data availability was the expensive part of running a rollup before blobs existed; on Base Chain it now costs less than a fifth of what overhead costs, and calldata has all but vanished from the bill. Whether that collapse changes where withdrawals get routed is the next question our crypto exchange market data will answer.

Which crypto has the lowest gas fees?

Lighter recorded an on-chain cost of $0.000003 per user operation in L2BEAT’s table, against $0.000035 for Base Chain and Ink. Those are settlement costs the network absorbs, so the fee a user pays at the wallet differs and depends on how each rollup prices its own blockspace.

What Rollups Earn After Paying Ethereum

• growthepie defines rent paid to L1 as the gas fees Layer 2 networks incur to post transaction data and verification states onto Ethereum.
• Across the chains growthepie tracks, on-chain revenue reached $419,473.79 against $1,739.62 in costs, leaving $416,589.57 in on-chain profit.
• Base Chain posted 508.87 GB of blob data against 80.04 GB for OP Mainnet.
• Arbitrum One allocated 15.1% of its cost base to blobs, against 7.8% for Base Chain.
• The amount of rent paid to L1 depends mostly on Ethereum gas prices and on how much data Layer 2 networks post.

Source: growthepie Onchain Economics, September 2026

Ethereum’s security is now one of the cheapest inputs a rollup buys. The direction has been consistent since blobs shipped: the settlement bill shrinks as a share of revenue while the chains that pay it keep growing.

Blob Capacity and the Blob Fee Market

• PeerDAS distributes blobs uniformly at random across nodes, with each full node holding only 1/8th of the data and enabling theoretical scale up to 8x.
• Any portion of the blob data can be reconstructed from any existing 50% of the whole.
• Layer 2 networks pay two bills when they post data: the blob fee and the execution gas needed to verify those blobs.
• EIP-7918 pins a proportional reserve price under every blob, so a blob fee auction can no longer spiral down to 1 wei and stop being a price signal.
• With the reserve in place, Layer 2 networks pay at least a meaningful slice of the compute they force on nodes.

Source: Ethereum Foundation Fusaka roadmap and builder guidance, 2026

Why it matters: EIP-7918 means Fusaka’s capacity expansion did not hand rollups unlimited free data. The Ethereum Foundation’s own framing is that base-fee spikes on the execution layer can no longer strand the blob fee, so the blob market keeps reacting to congestion even as 8x theoretical headroom arrives.

Daily Blob Submissions by Data Availability Layer

• Ethereum blob submissions averaged 32,510 a day on a 7-day rolling basis, down 17% over 24 hours and 17% over 30 days.
• Ethereum’s blob count fell 6.8% year over year while Celestia’s rose 363%.
• EigenDA averaged 899.00 blobs a day, down 31% year over year.
• A blob carries the transaction information needed to recreate the state of a rollup.
• growthepie describes blob count as a measure of data throughput and scalability for a data availability layer.

Source: growthepie Blob Count, September 2026

The Upgrades That Cut Ethereum Gas Fees

• Dencun introduced EIP-4844 in March 2024 and gave rollups their own data lane through blobs, with a separate fee market.
• Rollups stopped competing with ordinary execution traffic on the same blockspace after Dencun.
• Consensys counts Fusaka as the 17th major upgrade to Ethereum, arriving about seven months after Pectra.
• Fusaka’s dozen EIPs went through three successful testnet runs, finishing on the Hoodi testnet.
• The Ethereum Foundation’s builder guidance states that the next upgrade, Glamsterdam, is set to push fees lower still.

How Ethereum’s Base Fee Is Set

• The total gas a user pays splits into the base fee, set by the protocol, and the priority fee, a tip set by the user.
• A transaction that pays only the base fee is valid, and the priority fee is the tip a user adds to make it attractive to validators.
• Every block has a base fee that acts as a reserve price for inclusion.
• The base fee rises or falls by a maximum of 12.5% per block depending on whether the previous block ran above or below the target size.
• The base fee is burned when the block is created, removing it from circulation.

Source: Ethereum Foundation developer documentation, 2026

That split is why the fee slider in a self-custody wallet moves only the tip. Readers tracking the wider self-custody wallet ecosystem will recognize the design: the protocol prices inclusion, and the user prices urgency.

Where Ethereum’s Burned Fees Come From

• Fee burn destroys the ETH base fees paid for transaction inclusion, and started on August 5, 2021, with the activation of EIP-1559.
• Priority fees paid on top of base fees are not burned.
• The ETH supply decreases whenever more ETH is destroyed via fee burn than is created via issuance.
• ETH supply stood at 122,059,269.27, with supply growth running at +0.87% a year on September 20, 2026.
• DeFi transactions led the burn leaderboard at 50 ETH, ahead of transfers at 14 ETH and NFTs at 5 ETH.

The burn mix tracks where activity concentrates, which is why protocol usage measured in the decentralized finance market data maps closely onto which categories destroy the most ETH.

Why Do Ethereum Gas Fees Spike on Some Days?

Gas prices spike when blocks fill past their target, and the protocol responds mechanically. The base fee moves up or down by as much as 12.5% per block depending on whether the previous block ran above or below the target. That per-block adjustment lets the fee climb while blocks stay above the target and ease back once they fall below it.

The day-level record shows how quickly that resolves. August 24, 2026 averaged 1.902 gwei while August 29 averaged 0.4649 gwei, five days apart. A spike in this regime is a scheduling inconvenience rather than a cost event, which is the sharpest break from the fee behavior most readers remember.

What Happens If You Do Not Have Enough ETH for Gas?

A transaction with insufficient ETH for its gas simply does not go through. The base fee is the protocol minimum a transaction must offer to be considered valid, so a wallet without the balance to cover gas used multiplied by the offered gas price cannot produce a valid transaction.

Under-paying rather than under-funding has a different outcome. Offering only the base fee makes a transaction less attractive to validators than one that adds a priority tip. The fee is also paid whether the transaction succeeds or fails, which is why a reverted contract call still costs gas even though nothing changed on chain.

How Do You Reduce Ethereum Gas Fees?

Moving the activity to a rollup is the structural answer. Base Chain’s settlement cost to Ethereum ran at $0.000035 per user operation between August 21 and September 20, 2026, and the Layer 2 gas fee market data shows how differently each network prices that blockspace onward to users.

Timing and operation choice do the rest. September 6, 2026 averaged 0.6766 gwei against 1.133 gwei on September 15, so the same transaction cost materially less on the quieter day. An ERC-20 approve uses roughly 46,000 gas against roughly 180,000 gas for a swap, so batching approvals and avoiding redundant calls cuts the gas consumed before the gas price ever enters the arithmetic. Wallet defaults matter as much as protocol capacity here, since the network a wallet selects on a user’s behalf decides which fee schedule that user ever sees, a pattern visible across Trust Wallet user data.

Conclusion

Ethereum’s most recent daily average gas price was 0.8993 gwei, 27.99% below the same point a year earlier, and a plain transfer costs $0.025 at the 0.5 gwei benchmark. Rollups now carry about 95% of Ethereum’s transactions, and three upgrades widened the blob lane while the L1 gas limit rose from 30 million to 60 million. The chains paying Ethereum for settlement hold on-chain margins between 94.7% and 99.9%, per growthepie’s on-chain economics data. Builders on mainnet and users moving funds between rollups both gain from that shift.

The pattern holds across capacity upgrades: each one lowers the floor and widens the gap between the gwei headline and the dollar reality. Glamsterdam is queued to push that floor lower again, and the number worth watching is not the gas price but the share of the cost base that blobs still represent.