Definition
A mining pool fee is the cut a pool keeps from the rewards it distributes, charged in exchange for aggregating many miners' hashrate, smoothing out luck, and handling payouts. The fee is usually expressed as a percentage of earnings and commonly falls between 0% and 4%. The exact figure is tightly linked to the pool's payout scheme, because different schemes shift the risk of bad luck between the pool and the miner — and whoever carries that risk expects to be compensated.
How payout scheme sets the fee
Under Pay-Per-Share (PPS) and Full-Pay-Per-Share (FPPS), the pool guarantees payment for every valid share regardless of whether it actually finds a block, absorbing all the variance itself. To pay for that insurance, these schemes charge more — often in the 2–4% range — with FPPS also crediting an average share of transaction fees. Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares (PPLNS), by contrast, only pays when the pool finds a block, pushing variance onto the miner; in return it typically charges lower fees, sometimes near zero.
Reading the true cost
The headline fee is not the whole story. A low PPLNS fee can still underperform a higher FPPS fee for a miner with intermittent uptime, while a high-uptime operation may keep more under PPLNS. Whether the scheme includes transaction fees, how payouts are timed, and minimum-payout thresholds all affect realized income.
Pool choice is one of the few levers a miner fully controls, and it interacts directly with hardware efficiency and electricity cost. For how miners shift hashrate toward better-paying targets, see profit switching; for instruments that hedge this revenue, see hashrate derivatives.
Compare pools in the pool centralization tracker.
In Simple Terms
A mining pool fee is the cut a pool keeps from the rewards it distributes, charged in exchange for aggregating many miners’ hashrate, smoothing out…