What this means for a holder
The block count is a fact and the date is a forecast, and almost everything written about halvings blurs the two. Blocks remaining is exact arithmetic: subtract the current height from 1,050,000. Turning that into a day requires guessing how fast the next 90,114 blocks will be found, and on the three reasonable guesses above the answer moves by 31 days.
The more interesting question is what to expect around it, and here our data is thin in a way worth being blunt about: we hold exactly two post-halving paths. They agree on timing to within 12 days — highs at +546 d and +534 d — and disagree on size by a factor of about 4. If you had taken the 2020 cycle as a template in April 2024 and sized a position on it, the shape would have been roughly right and the magnitude wrong several times over. Magnitude is the part that determines outcomes.
Note also what the second cycle has done that the first never did. In the 827 days after the 2020 halving bitcoin did not close below its halving-day price once. In the same window after 2024 it has done so on 167 days, including 26 Jul 2026, which leaves the 2024 index at 100.7. A holder who treated "price never goes below the halving level" as a rule learned in this cycle that it was a description of one sample.
The way we would use this page: as a calendar entry, not a plan. The supply reduction is real, public and already known to everyone who prices bitcoin, so the case that it must move price is weaker than the case that it has coincided with moves. If you buy on a schedule, nothing here is a reason to change the schedule — and if a countdown clock feels like a reason, that is worth noticing on its own.
Read the full guide
Bitcoin Halving Cycles, Compared
The 2020 and 2024 cycles measured side by side from our own daily closes — where they rhyme, where they do not, and why two observations are not a cycle.
Frequently asked questions
When is the next Bitcoin halving?
At block 1,050,000. On the numbers on this page that is roughly April 2028 – May 2028 — 90,114 blocks away. The block is fixed by the protocol and cannot move; the date is arithmetic on an assumed block speed and moves with it. Our estimates — the current observed pace, the protocol’s ten-minute target, the pace of the last completed epoch — span 5 Apr 2028 to 6 May 2028. Anyone quoting a single day two years out is quoting one of those assumptions and not telling you which.
What actually changes at the halving?
The block subsidy — the new bitcoin paid to whoever mines a block — halves from 3.125 BTC to 1.5625 BTC. Nothing else in the protocol changes, and nothing obliges anyone to buy. Issuance falls by about 217 BTC a day at the current block pace. The event is public, dated in blocks and has been known since 2009, which is the standard objection to the idea that it should move the price, and a fair one.
How is the countdown calculated?
Current height comes from blockchain.info, cached for ten minutes. Blocks remaining is 1,050,000 minus that height — exact. The date is blocks remaining multiplied by an assumed seconds-per-block, which is why we publish three of them rather than pretend to one. The seconds on the clock are extrapolated in the browser from the server's estimate; nothing is fetched after the page loads.
Does the halving make the price go up?
Our price history covers two halvings, which is enough to describe and not enough to generalise. After 2020 bitcoin reached 7.9× its halving-day close; after 2024 it has reached 1.9× so far. The useful control is ether, which has no halving: in the 827 days after the 2020 halving it stood at 1,010 on the same index against bitcoin's 278.6. An asset with no supply event outrunning bitcoin inside bitcoin's own window is hard to explain with the supply cut alone.
Why do the two cycles look so different?
They agree on timing and disagree on size. The 2020 high came 546 days after its halving, the 2024 high so far came 534 days after its own — 12 days apart. But the 2020 cycle multiplied its halving-day price by 7.9 and the 2024 cycle by 1.9. Two matching dates out of two observations is one coincidence away from being nothing at all, and the 2024 cycle is still running.
Is the four-year cycle real?
The rhythm is visible; the schedule is not. The two halvings we can measure are 1,440 days apart, not the 1,461 days of four calendar years — three weeks of slippage in a single interval, because blocks arrive faster or slower than the target. The two normalised paths correlate at 0.71 over 828 days when compared as levels — but both paths start at 1.0 and rise, so most of that number is the shared upward trend rather than a shared shape. Compared day to day, as changes, the same two cycles correlate at 0.00 — essentially not at all. The broad arc rhymes; the individual days do not. Neither is a schedule you can plan around, and two halvings are two observations.
How this page is calculated
- Block height comes from
blockchain.info/q/getblockcount, cached for ten minutes. If it is unreachable we carry the last reading forward at 600 seconds per block and label the height estimated rather than hiding the gap. - The observed block pace is blockchain.info's published average time between blocks. It moves with hashrateHashrateHow much computing power is competing to add the next bitcoin block. More of it makes blocks arrive faster, until the network adjusts its difficulty roughly every two weeks to bring the pace back to ten minutes.Full entry in the glossary → and is corrected by the difficulty retarget every 2,016 blocks, which is why we show the protocol target and the last completed epoch alongside it instead of extrapolating a short-window pace over two years.
- The last completed epoch is measured from our own halving dates: 1,440 days for 210,000 blocks, or 592.5 seconds per block.
- Cycle comparison uses daily closes in UTC from CoinGecko with Binance as a fallback. Each halving-day close is set to 100 and every other day is expressed against it, so the two cycles can share an axis. Days are calendar days from the halving date.
- Both cycles are truncated at +827 d, the current age of the 2024 cycle. Highs, drawdowns and multiples for 2020 are therefore measured over that same window and not over the whole cycle — otherwise the comparison would flatter whichever cycle had more time.
- Two halvings is a small sample. Nothing on this page is a base rate. The 2012 and 2016 halvings predate our price series and are not used.