Time to first payout: how long you wait for money from a mining pool

The short version

A pool's fee decides how much you earn. Its payout threshold decides when you see it on your own address. At 100 TH/s the income gap between the cheapest and the most expensive pool in this sample is 9 cents a day. The gap in waiting time between NiceHash and Foundry USA is not measured in percent but in hundreds of days: their thresholds differ by a factor of a thousand, 0.00001 BTC against 0.01 BTC.

What follows converts the published thresholds of twelve pools into days of waiting. The formula is dull: days = threshold / net BTC per day. Net income comes from the August pool comparison, and the thresholds come from the same table, checked on 2026-08-18 against the pools' own pages.

How many days until the first payout from a mining pool?

It depends on the threshold paired with your hashrate. At 100 TH/s, pools with a 0.0001 BTC threshold (EMCD, Promminer) pay roughly every two days. Pools at 0.001 BTC (Trustpool, Luxor, Kryptex, ViaBTC, Neopool) pay roughly every three weeks. Pools at 0.005 BTC (AntPool, F2Pool) take about 107 days. NiceHash, at 0.00001 BTC, clears in a few hours.

Table: days to first payout

Calculated on net income after the pool fee, before electricity. Network snapshot of 2026-08-14: hashrate 933.99 EH/s, difficulty 127,479,855,693,691, block reward 3.125 BTC, transaction fees running at 0.70% of the reward.

Two rows need a caveat. Neopool publishes its threshold but not its fee, so we cannot derive a daily figure or a waiting time from it, and any number in those cells would be a guess. Binance Pool is the mirror image: the fee is public, the minimum payout is not. Foundry USA is computed at the four percent group's rate, since its own terms are negotiated and tiered.

Why does the threshold matter more than the fee at small hashrate?

Because the fee moves your income by a few percent while the threshold moves your waiting time by whole multiples. The spread between 1% and 4% at 100 TH/s is 9 cents a day, roughly $33 a year. The spread between a 0.00001 BTC threshold and a 0.01 BTC one turns five hours of waiting into seven months on the same hardware. Those are not comparable quantities.

The arithmetic behind it is unglamorous and stubborn. A fee is taken from the same expected share of the network in every pool: your 100 TH/s against 934 EH/s has identical expectation everywhere, and the pool withholds its percentage of that. Three percent stays three percent. A threshold lives somewhere else entirely. It is not a percentage of anything, it is a fixed amount in BTC, and your daily income either reaches it or does not.

The extreme case shows up on Bitaxe class devices. At 1 TH/s, income in a 4% pool runs about 0.00000047 BTC a day. Reaching 0.005 BTC at AntPool or F2Pool takes roughly 10,700 days, close to 29 years. The same 1 TH/s fills the EMCD and Promminer threshold in about 215 days. EMCD's fee, incidentally, is higher than Trustpool's, which is exactly the situation where the pricier pool is the only one that works at all.

What does "not published" mean in the threshold column?

Only that the pool does not state a minimum payout on its open pages. That is not an accusation and not a warning sign: some pools put payout terms behind a login, or negotiate them with larger clients. But from the outside there is nothing to verify, so the cell stays empty rather than getting a plausible number written into it.

Which threshold suits which miner

One ASIC at 100 TH/s or less, first time mining. Pick a threshold of 0.0001 BTC or lower. The first payout lands within a couple of days, you see real satoshis on your address, and you know the worker, pool and wallet chain is wired correctly. Testing a fresh setup on a pool where the first money arrives in three months is uncomfortable.

A home farm at 300 TH/s and up, hardware already stable. A 0.001 BTC threshold stops being an obstacle: payouts arrive weekly or better. At this point uptime, rejected share rate and latency to the stratum server deserve more attention than the minimum.

1 PH/s and above. The threshold barely registers, since even 0.005 BTC fills in 10 to 11 days. This is where the fee spread finally becomes real money, around $343 a year between 1% and 4%.

Bitaxe and solo devices under 5 TH/s. Thresholds of 0.005 and 0.01 BTC are out for arithmetic reasons, not preference. Only the top of the table applies to you.

One caveat on low thresholds. If the pool passes the on-chain fee to you, frequent small payouts eat a visible share of the payout itself. A low threshold is valuable as an option to exit, not as an instruction to withdraw daily. Letting a balance build and sending it in one transaction is usually cheaper.

How accurate are these timelines?

They are an estimate at current difficulty, not a promise. Difficulty retargets every 2016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, and your daily BTC income moves with it. Difficulty up, waiting time up. How retargets work and what they do to profitability is covered in our piece on network difficulty.

Three more things stretch the timeline in practice:

1. Real hardware hashrate differs from the spec sheet, often a few percent low.
2. Rejected shares and downtime earn nothing while the clock keeps running.
3. Under PPLNS style schemes the daily result swings around expectation more than under FPPS, so the first payout can arrive early or late.

You can rerun the numbers for your own hashrate and tariff in the mining profitability calculator. If you are still choosing between payout schemes, PPS, FPPS, PPLNS and SOLO are laid out in the payout scheme reference.

FAQ

Can I withdraw from a pool before hitting the threshold?

Usually not. The balance accumulates until it passes the minimum payout, and only then enters the send queue. Some pools offer a manual withdrawal of a smaller amount for an extra fee, but that is the exception.

Why did my first payout arrive later than the calculation suggests?

Beyond the threshold, pools run on a schedule: payouts go out once a day in a fixed window, and the daily accrual closes at a set UTC hour. Cross the threshold just after the cutoff and your money waits for the next batch. Some pools also delay the very first payout on a new account.

What if the threshold is unreachable at my hashrate?

Move to a pool with a lower one. Nothing else works, since you cannot increase your share of blocks and waiting 29 years is not a plan. When you move, remember that the leftover balance in the old pool stays stuck below its threshold.

Does the payout scheme affect time to first payout?

Indirectly, yes. FPPS and PPS+ credit a steady stream, so the calculated timeline tracks reality closely. PPLNS ties credit to blocks the pool actually finds, and at small hashrate the variance is visible: for several days you may be credited well above or below expectation.

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POOL BTC runs these comparisons from the outside. We do not mine and we do not accept hashrate. We check what pools publish themselves and turn it into numbers you can decide on.