How Many Bitcoins Are There, and How Many Are Left?

How many bitcoins exist today

Every new bitcoin enters circulation as a reward to the miner who adds a block to the chain. The reward per block is fixed by the software, so the total in existence follows directly from the block height. The mempool.space and Blockstream explorers both showed a height of 973,447 at 19:28 UTC on 27 October 2026. Adding up the reward schedule from the first block in January 2009 to that block gives 20,104,525 bitcoin, which is 95.7% of the 21 million cap. Blockchain.com's supply counter, which updates in steps, read 20,104,500 when checked.

That leaves about 895,475 bitcoin still to be created. The current reward is 3.125 bitcoin per block, and the network targets one block every 10 minutes, or about 144 a day. New supply therefore runs at roughly 450 bitcoin a day and 164,000 a year.

Source: era start dates are the timestamps of the halving blocks on mempool.space. Totals follow the subsidy rule in Bitcoin Core.

Where the 21 million cap comes from

The 21 million cap is the sum of the reward schedule. In Bitcoin Core, the function GetBlockSubsidy starts at 50 bitcoin per block and halves it every 210,000 blocks, the value of the parameter nSubsidyHalvingInterval. A geometric series that starts at 10.5 million coins and halves each time converges on 21 million.

The exact ceiling is slightly lower. Rewards are counted in satoshis, with 100,000,000 satoshis to one bitcoin, and each halving discards any fraction of a satoshi. Summing the schedule in whole satoshis gives a maximum of 20,999,999.9769 bitcoin. A comment next to the MAX_MONEY constant in the Bitcoin Core source makes the same point: the 21 million figure in the code is a sanity check, and the actual supply "happens to be less than 21,000,000 BTC".

After 32 halvings the reward is one satoshi. At the 33rd, which falls at block 6,930,000, it drops to zero. At 10 minutes a block that is a little over 113 years from now, which puts the last newly issued bitcoin around the year 2140. From then on, miners would be paid by transaction fees alone.

Halvings: April 2024 and the next one

The fourth halving took effect at block 840,000, timestamped 00:09 UTC on 20 April 2024. The reward fell from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoin, cutting new issuance from about 900 to about 450 bitcoin a day.

The fifth halving is due at block 1,050,000, when the reward falls to 1.5625. At block 973,447 there were 76,553 blocks to go. Over the 52,560 blocks before 27 October 2026, blocks arrived every 602 seconds on average, which points to mid-April 2028. The date is an estimate because block times vary with the computing power pointed at the network. The protocol resets mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks, roughly two weeks, to pull the average back toward 10 minutes; the next reset is at block 973,728.

Halvings are known years in advance and are written into the software, so the supply side holds no surprises. What changes at each one is the flow of new coins that miners can sell. After April 2028, annual new supply drops to about 82,000 bitcoin.

How many bitcoins are lost

Some coins are provably gone. Shortly before the May 2020 halving, Bitcoin Core contributor Fabian Jahr reconciled the set of spendable coins at block 629,038 against the issuance schedule and found exactly 182.67920835 bitcoin missing. That total breaks down as follows:

• 50 bitcoin from the genesis block, whose reward can never be spent
• 100 bitcoin lost when two mining reward transactions were duplicated in November 2010, the flaw later closed by the BIP 30 rule
• 3.72 bitcoin deliberately destroyed through OP_RETURN outputs
• 28.96 bitcoin that miners were entitled to but never claimed

Everything beyond that is an estimate, because a coin whose keys are lost looks the same on the chain as a coin held by a patient owner. The main published figures differ widely:

• Chainalysis, November 2017: 2.78 million to 3.79 million bitcoin lost, 17% to 23% of the coins then in existence, as reported by Fortune. Both ends of the range assume the coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, put at about 1 million, will never move.
• River, 2025 custody report: a conservative 1.57 million bitcoin permanently lost, 98% of it before 2020. River's report also says more than 3 million have been lost once coins lost by exchanges to hacks, theft and bankruptcy are included.
• Sergio Demian Lerner, 2019: close to 1.1 million bitcoin mined by a single early miner, known as Patoshi, whom Lerner links to Satoshi.

Subtracting the published loss estimates from the 20.1 million issued leaves somewhere between about 16.3 million and 18.5 million bitcoin that can still change hands.

What the cap means next to the dollar

At about 164,000 new coins a year, bitcoin's supply is growing at roughly 0.8% a year, and that rate halves again in 2028. The broad dollar money stock grew faster. M2 reached $23.41 trillion in September 2026, up 5.7% from $22.15 trillion a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve's H.6 release of 27 October 2026.

Two caveats matter. A fixed supply says nothing about price, which is set by demand and has swung widely since 2009. And the schedule holds only as long as the computers running the network keep enforcing it. Changing it would require the network's nodes to adopt different software.

For the basics of how the system works, see our guide to what bitcoin is. The inflation calculator shows what the growth in dollars has done to prices, and the gold, silver and digital assets hub covers the other assets measured against the dollar.