Estimate daily coins, revenue, electricity cost, net profit, and break-even time for CPU mining. Enter your own data or load the sample profile and adjust from there.
This is an estimate only. Real-world mining returns vary with network difficulty, stale shares, market volatility, pool luck, and hardware throttling.
How to use this CPU miner calculator
This tool helps you evaluate whether CPU mining is worth doing under your specific conditions. Many people jump into mining by only looking at hashrate and coin price, but profitability depends on a full set of variables: your share of network hashrate, total blocks produced daily, pool fees, uptime, and electricity cost.
Enter your hardware and market assumptions in the calculator above. The output includes estimated coins per day, gross revenue, power cost, net profit, and an approximate break-even period if you include hardware cost.
What each input means
CPU Hashrate
Your hashrate is the number of hashes your CPU can process per second. This is usually shown in your mining software dashboard. Use a realistic average rather than peak speed.
Network Hashrate
This represents the total hashrate of all miners on the network. Your expected share of block rewards is based on:
- Your hashrate ÷ network hashrate
- Adjusted for uptime and pool fee
Block reward and block time
Block reward is how many coins are issued per block. Block time is the average number of seconds between blocks. Together they determine how many coins are distributed each day across the entire network.
Power and electricity
CPU mining can look profitable before electricity costs are included. Always measure your real wall power draw and use your actual utility rate ($/kWh), not a generic number from the internet.
Formulas used by the calculator
- Blocks/day = 86,400 ÷ block time
- Gross coins/day = (effective hashrate ÷ network hashrate) × block reward × blocks/day
- Effective hashrate = hashrate × uptime%
- Net coins/day = gross coins/day × (1 − pool fee%)
- Revenue/day = net coins/day × coin price
- Power cost/day = (watts ÷ 1000) × 24 × electricity rate
- Net profit/day = revenue/day − power cost/day
How to interpret your results
If net daily profit is negative, you are effectively paying to mine. In that case, mining may still be a strategic choice for learning, supporting a network, or speculative accumulation—but it is not cash-flow positive under current assumptions.
If net daily profit is positive, check the break-even days. A long break-even period can be risky because difficulty may rise or coin price may fall before you recover hardware cost.
Ways to improve CPU mining profitability
- Undervolt and tune your CPU for best hashes per watt, not only max hashrate.
- Use efficient cooling to avoid throttling during long runs.
- Compare multiple pools for fee, payout reliability, and stale share rate.
- Mine during lower electricity-cost periods if your utility has time-of-use pricing.
- Track profitability weekly—network difficulty and coin price can move fast.
Common mistakes beginners make
- Ignoring electricity cost entirely.
- Using unrealistic benchmark hashrates instead of sustained values.
- Forgetting pool fees and downtime.
- Assuming today’s profitability lasts for months.
- Buying hardware solely from social media hype.
Final thoughts
A CPU miner calculator is most useful when you treat it as a planning tool, not a guarantee. The right question is not only “How much can I earn?” but also “How sensitive is this to market and difficulty changes?” Run multiple scenarios—optimistic, neutral, and conservative—before committing money.
If you approach mining with realistic assumptions, disciplined cost tracking, and risk awareness, you’ll make better decisions and avoid expensive surprises.