Gas Fee Volatility Statistics 2026: Daily Swings and Fee Spikes

Ethereum’s average gas price fell 36.12% from the previous day to 0.7302 gwei on September 26, 2026, according to the Etherscan series YCharts publishes. Two days earlier, on September 24, 2026, the daily average stood at 2.348 gwei. Yet the average Ethereum transaction fee in dollars rose 0.15% to $0.2691 on the September 26 reading, a gap that runs through the gas fee volatility statistics below.

On Ethereum, the base fee can increase or decrease by a maximum of 12.5% per block, and Bitcoin block 840,000 carried 37.626 BTC in total fees on April 20, 2024. The figures below cover daily fee swings on both networks, the spike limits written into Ethereum’s fee rules, the blob fee market, and what economists have measured about how users respond when fees jump.

Key Takeaways

• Ethereum’s daily average gas price was 0.3191 gwei on August 15 and 2.348 gwei on September 24, 2026, a 7.4x difference between those two readings.
• The average dollar fee per Ethereum transaction was $0.2397 on September 16 and $0.2775 on September 22, 2026, a far narrower band than the gwei series.
• According to ethereum.org, gwei readings can swing widely inside a normal month while the dollar cost barely moves, because rollups carry about 95% of Ethereum’s transactions.
• In ethereum.org’s worked example, the base fee climbs from 100 gwei to 202.7 gwei by block 8 when each block uses the full gas limit.
• A 10% fee increase reduced total gas demand on Ethereum mainnet by approximately 0.06% in 2025, per a 2026 study of Ethereum and Arbitrum One.
• Bitcoin’s average transaction fee fell 49.49% in one day to $0.2915 on September 26, 2026.
• Block 840,000 paid 3,762,561,499 sats in fees against 104,455,386 sats in block 839,999, a 36x jump in one block.

Editor’s Choice

• Latest Ethereum daily average gas price: 0.7302 gwei on September 26, 2026.
• Ethereum 7-day gas market: a minimum of 0.0, a maximum of 24.9, and an average of 0.5 gwei on ultrasound.money.
• Year-over-year change in Ethereum gas price: -48.43% from 1.416 gwei one year earlier.
• Bitcoin average fee one year earlier: $1.104, against $0.2915 on September 26, 2026.
• Fees in the halving block: 37.626 BTC, worth $2,402,283, in block 840,000.
• The floor the blob fee could fall to without a blob reserve price: 1 wei when execution costs dominate blob demand.

Ethereum Gas Fee Volatility Statistics

• Ethereum’s daily average gas price was 1.347 gwei on September 23 before reaching 2.348 gwei on September 24, 2026, a 74% one-day rise.
• The series moved from 0.9466 gwei on August 23 to 1.902 gwei on August 24, 2026, roughly 2x overnight.
• ultrasound.money’s 7-day gas market shows a maximum of 24.9 against an average of 0.5 gwei, so the top of the week sat 49.8x above its mean.
• Quieter days still varied, from 0.4391 gwei on August 16 to 0.4214 gwei on August 17, 2026.

Source: Etherscan via YCharts 2026, ultrasound.money September 2026

About This Data

The figures come from 27 sources: 10 primary sources, 13 industry and research sources, and 4 secondary sources. They span protocol specifications first published in 2019 through daily series as of September 27, 2026. Only primary specifications, block explorers, public dashboards, and peer-reviewed or preprint research qualified; the four secondary YCharts series trace to Etherscan and Blockchain.com. Figures are reviewed on a rolling basis and updated when sources publish new data.

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Ethereum Daily Gas Price, August to September 2026

• Ethereum’s daily average gas price was 0.4303 gwei on August 18 and 1.435 gwei on August 19, 2026, a 233% one-day increase.
• On August 21, 2026, the daily average reached 1.632 gwei, then eased to 1.015 gwei on August 22.
• The average hit 1.133 gwei on September 15 and fell to 0.7804 gwei on September 16, 2026.
• Readings were 0.8373 gwei on September 14 and 0.8043 gwei on September 17, 2026.
• The daily average was 0.5499 gwei on August 10 and 0.3305 gwei on August 9, 2026.

Recent Developments

• August 11, 2026: Version 3 of a gas-demand study covering Ethereum mainnet and Arbitrum One estimated a pooled Ethereum elasticity of -0.006 for full-year 2025.
• August 24, 2026: The Ethereum Foundation said the Glamsterdam repricing schedule is derived from a performance target that supports roughly a 3x increase in base throughput.
• September 9, 2026: The Ethereum Foundation said the Glamsterdam hard fork is in public testing, while the scope of Hegotá is being narrowed down.
• September 24, 2026: Ethereum’s daily average gas price reached 2.348 gwei, up from 1.347 gwei on September 23.
• September 26, 2026: Bitcoin’s average transaction fee dropped to $0.2915, down 49.49% from $0.5771 a day earlier.
• October 6, 2026: Glamsterdam’s next milestone is the Sepolia fork, with mainnet expected in Q4 2026.

Gas Price in Gwei vs Transaction Fee in Dollars

• A year earlier, the average Ethereum transaction fee was $0.3863, so the September 26, 2026 level sat 30.34% lower.
• The average fee was $0.2397 on September 16, $0.2416 on September 17, and $0.2446 on September 18, 2026.
• According to ethereum.org, L1 typically runs well below its block target, and mainnet fees are now low enough that many apps can sensibly run on mainnet.
• Average Ethereum transaction fees reached around $3 during the 2017 to early 2018 crypto boom, according to YCharts’ series notes.

Why it matters: Ethereum’s daily gas price rose about 237% between September 20 and September 24, 2026, yet the average dollar fee rose about 2% across the same days, based on Etherscan data. A gwei chart overstates how much a typical user’s bill moves.

How Fast Ethereum’s Base Fee Can Rise

• According to the ethereum.org gas and fees documentation, the base fee is determined by the blocks before it, which makes transaction fees more predictable for users.
• The target block size is half of the gas limit, and the base fee is burned when the block is created.
• Ten consecutive full blocks at the per-block ceiling would lift the base fee about 3.25x.
• Ten consecutive empty blocks would cut it to about 26% of its starting level.
• The EIP-1559 authors described the mechanism as a fixed-per-block network fee that is burned and dynamically expands and contracts block sizes to deal with transient congestion.

EIP-1559 Fee Market Parameters

• The change denominator caps each per-block base fee move at 12.5%.
• The specification’s initial base fee works out to 1 gwei.
• The motivation section of the EIP-1559 specification states that bids to include transactions on mature public blockchains that have enough usage so that blocks are full tend to be extremely volatile.

Source: EIP-1559 specification 2019, ethereum.org 2026

How much can Ethereum gas fees change in one block?

On Ethereum, the base fee can increase or decrease by a maximum of 12.5% per block, rising when the previous block was above its target size and falling when it was below. A wallet can therefore tell a user with certainty that the maximum base fee for the next block is the current base fee times 112.5%.

Blob Fee Volatility on Ethereum

• Under Pectra’s blob parameters, full blobs raise the blob base fee by about 8.2% per block, and no blobs lower it by about 14.5%, the price rollups face in the Layer 2 gas fee market.
• It takes two blocks with full blobs in a row to make up for a single block with no blobs.
• Without a blob reserve price, a 10% change in the blob base fee could shift the total cost of utilizing blobspace by just 0.0000001% when execution costs dominated.
• Whenever demand picked up, over an hour of near-full blocks was required to restore a market-clearing equilibrium fee.
• In the September 27, 2026 capture, Blobscan showed a blob gas price of 58,286,787 wei against an average blob gas price of 1.907 gwei, about 3.1% of that average.
• Blobscan counts 22,472,826 total blobs and 5,005.877 ether in total blob fees.

Source: EIP-4844, EIP-7691 and EIP-7918 specifications, 2024 to 2025

Bitcoin Transaction Fee Volatility

• Bitcoin’s average transaction fee was $1.104 one year before September 26, 2026, and the latest level is 73.61% lower.
• The average fee was $0.1737 on August 16 and $0.2156 on August 15, 2026.
• Bitcoin’s average fee on September 25 was about 2.6x the September 20 level.
• Average Bitcoin transaction fees reached nearly $60 during the 2017 crypto boom, according to YCharts’ series notes, and cross-network fee peaks are compared in the highest crypto transaction fees rankings.
• The metric measures the average fee in USD when a Bitcoin transaction is processed by a miner and confirmed.

Bitcoin Daily Fee Revenue

• Bitcoin total transaction fees per day were $462,875.8 a year earlier, and the September 26, 2026 total was 52.31% lower.
• The daily total was $144,343.8 on August 16 and $155,142.2 on August 15, 2026.
• The totals do not include the value of Coinbase block rewards, so the new-coin subsidy sits outside these figures.

The Bitcoin Halving Block Fee Spike

• Block 840,000 recorded a median fee of about 200 sat/vB and a fee span of 108 to 3,604,819 sat/vB.
• The block before it, 839,999, had a median fee of 90 sat/vB.
• The block subsidy fell to 3.125 BTC in the halving block, from 6.25 BTC one block earlier; the supply schedule is covered in the Bitcoin statistics data.
• Fees made up about 92% of what the miner earned from that block.
• On September 27, 2026, mempool.space’s fee estimator returned a fastestFee of 1, an hourFee of 1, and an economyFee of 1 sat/vB.

By the numbers: According to mempool.space data, the halving block paid about 4,187 times the fees of a block mined on September 27, 2026, which carried 898,631 sats across 1,228 transactions. Against Ethereum’s capped base fee, the contrast is stark: Bitcoin’s jump arrived in a single block.

Day-Over-Day Fee Swings on Ethereum and Bitcoin

• Ethereum’s gas price fell from 1.143 gwei on September 25 to 0.7302 gwei on September 26, 2026.
• Bitcoin’s average fee dropped from $0.5771 on September 25 to $0.2915 on September 26, 2026.
• Bitcoin’s total daily fees fell from $345,536.5 on September 25 to $220,749.1 on September 26, 2026.
• Ethereum’s average dollar fee moved from $0.2687 to $0.2691 across the same two days.

Source: Etherscan and Blockchain.com via YCharts, September 2026

Year-Over-Year Change in Fee Metrics

• Bitcoin’s average fee fell about 1.5x as far as Ethereum’s gas price over the past year, in percentage terms.
• The average Ethereum transaction cost about $0.12 less than a year earlier.

Source: Etherscan and Blockchain.com via YCharts, September 2026

Are Bitcoin fees more volatile than Ethereum fees?

In dollar terms over the latest day, yes. Bitcoin’s average transaction fee fell 49.49% from September 25 to September 26, 2026, while Ethereum’s average dollar fee rose 0.15%. Measured in gwei, Ethereum’s gas price fell 36.12% over the same day, so the size of the gap depends on the unit being tracked.

What Research Says About EIP-1559 and Fee Volatility

• A causal study presented at ACM CCS 2022 drew on data from the Ethereum blockchain, the mempool, and exchanges.
• The same study found that when Ether’s price is more volatile, the waiting time is significantly higher.
• A study presented at IEEE Blockchain-2021 found short-term behavior marked by intense, chaotic oscillations in block sizes and slow adjustments during periods of demand bursts, such as NFT drops, the kind of mint rush tracked in NFT market growth data.
• Those authors proposed an AIMD base fee rule and reported that it robustly outperforms the EIP-1559 protocol under various demand scenarios in simulations.
• The 2026 elasticity study estimated a pooled Ethereum mainnet elasticity of -0.006 for the full year 2025.
• A 2023 study found that network activity, such as the sizes of blocks or the number of transactions and contracts, can show a heterogeneous relationship with gas prices across periods of low and high gas price changes.

Source: ACM CCS 2022, IEEE Blockchain-2021, MDPI 2023, arXiv 2026

Key finding: EIP-1559 improves the user experience by mitigating intrablock differences in the gas price paid and reducing users’ waiting times, but has only a small effect on gas fee levels, according to the ACM CCS 2022 study. The mechanism made fees easier to predict block to block, while demand shocks still pass straight through to price.

How Sensitive Gas Demand Is to Fee Changes

• The 2026 study instrumented each wallet’s own lagged base fee to remove the congestion-driven endogeneity that causes naive regressions to underestimate demand sensitivity.
• Behavioral clustering found high-volume operators substantially more responsive, with cluster-level elasticities up to roughly 6x the pooled estimate.
• Always-on protocol wallets were near-inelastic, with related figures in the Layer 2 network adoption data.
• On Ethereum mainnet over the full year 2025, a 10% fee increase reduced total gas demand by approximately 0.06%.
• On Ethereum, the base fee can rise by a maximum of 12.5% per block when the previous block was above its target size.
• Arbitrum One’s pooled elasticity is 6x Ethereum mainnet’s in absolute terms.

Source: Price Elasticity of Gas Demand on L1 and L2, arXiv, August 2026

Why do gas fees spike?

Gas demand is near-inelastic: on Ethereum mainnet over the full year 2025, a 10% fee increase reduced total gas demand by approximately 0.06%. When blocks fill, users barely pull back, so the fee mechanism clears the queue through price. On Ethereum, that price can increase by a maximum of 12.5% per block.

Fee Mechanisms Across Ethereum, Bitcoin and Solana

• Solana charges a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature, split 50% burned and 50% to the validator, one of the design gaps covered in the Solana vs Ethereum statistics.
• Solana’s optional prioritization fee goes 100% to the validator and increases the likelihood that the current leader schedules a transaction ahead of competing ones.
• A Solana transaction can use a maximum of 1,400,000 compute units.
• The EIP-1559 authors argued: It’s absurd to suggest that the cost incurred by the network from accepting one more transaction into a block actually is 10x more when the cost per gas is 10 nanoeth compared to when the cost per gas is 1 nanoeth.

Source: ethereum.org 2026, EIP-7691, mempool.space 2024, Solana documentation 2026

Ethereum Capacity Upgrades and Fee Volatility

• On Ethereum, the community steadily raised the mainnet gas limit from an initial 30 million to 60 million, the first significant increase since 2021, a shift traced in the history of Ethereum gas fees.
• The Ethereum Foundation’s 2026 protocol plan focuses on continuing to raise the gas limit toward and beyond 100 million.
• Glamsterdam enables a 200 million gas limit floor, and developers are testing at a 150 million reference block gas limit.
• Validators now sample blob data, enabling an 8x increase in theoretical blob capacity.
• Gas prices for state operations were last adjusted in the Berlin fork in 2021.

Conclusion

Ethereum’s daily average gas price fell 36.12% in a single day to 0.7302 gwei, while the average dollar fee rose 0.15%. That split defines gas fee volatility now: the protocol’s price signal still swings hard, but rollups and spare blockspace keep a typical user’s bill steady. Bitcoin shows the opposite exposure, with fees that can multiply within one block when demand arrives.

Glamsterdam’s next milestone is the Sepolia fork, and the upgrade enables a 200 million gas limit floor. More capacity should keep dollar costs low, but the base fee will still move by up to an eighth per block whenever demand outruns supply, and those are the swings the current Ethereum gas fee data will keep recording.