Is Monero Mining Profitable in 2026? Real Numbers and Formula

“Is Monero mining still worth it?” gets asked almost daily, and the honest answer is “it depends on your electricity price and your hardware.” The good news is that the math is simple enough to do on a napkin. This post gives you the formula, plugs in current numbers for common CPUs and shows where the break-even point lies.

Note: This article is for education only and is not financial advice. Crypto prices and mining difficulty change constantly; rerun the numbers with current data before deciding anything.

The Monero mining profit formula

Monero targets one block every two minutes, or about 720 blocks per day. Since June 2022 the block reward has been a fixed 0.6 XMR tail emission plus transaction fees, as explained in Moneropedia. That means the network issues roughly 432 XMR per day, and fees add a little on top.

Your expected share is your fraction of the total hashrate:

Daily XMR ≈ (your hashrate ÷ network hashrate) × 720 × 0.6
Daily revenue = Daily XMR × XMR price
Daily power cost = (watts ÷ 1000) × 24 × price per kWh
Daily profit = Daily revenue − Daily power cost − pool fee

That is all a mining calculator does. The inputs are what matter.

Current inputs (early November 2026)

From these, a handy rule of thumb follows:

• Each 1 kH/s earns about 0.0000686 XMR per day, which is about 0.002 XMR per month.
• At roughly $570 per XMR, that is about $0.04 per day, or $1.17 per month, per kH/s, before power costs.

Double your hashrate and you double that. If network hashrate rises 10%, your output drops about 10%.

Worked examples for popular CPUs

The hashrates below are realistic tuned figures, a little below the best submissions on the XMRig benchmark. The wattages are assumed whole-system power at the wall while mining; your own machine may draw more or less, so measure it.

Now subtract electricity. Daily power cost at three common prices:

What this tells you:

• Cheap power (around $0.10/kWh): a decent desktop makes a small profit, on the order of $10–15 a month for a 16-core chip.
• Average European or Californian prices ($0.25–0.35/kWh): most setups lose money if you count the full power draw.
• Old, inefficient hardware rarely breaks even anywhere except with very cheap or free electricity.

Key point: Only the extra power used by mining counts if the computer would be on anyway. A home server that idles at 60 W and draws 150 W while mining costs you 90 W, not 150 W. That can flip the result from a loss to a gain.

A worked example step by step

Say you have a Ryzen 7 desktop that does 12 kH/s, draws 130 W at the wall while mining and 50 W when idle, and you pay $0.18 per kWh. The PC is on all day anyway.

1. Share of the network: 12,000 ÷ 6,300,000,000 ≈ 0.0000019.
2. Daily XMR: 0.0000019 × 432 ≈ 0.00082 XMR.
3. Daily revenue at $570: about $0.47.
4. Extra power from mining: 130 W − 50 W = 80 W, or 1.92 kWh per day.
5. Extra power cost: 1.92 × $0.18 ≈ $0.35.
6. Daily profit: about $0.12, or roughly $3.60 a month.

If the same PC would otherwise be switched off, you have to count the full 130 W (3.12 kWh, about $0.56 a day) and the result turns into a small loss.

Factors that change the picture

XMR price

Revenue in dollars moves one-for-one with price. A 30% price swing changes your profit far more than any tuning you can do. Many miners treat mining as a way to accumulate XMR rather than to earn dollars, and judge it by “cost per XMR” instead.

Network hashrate

When the price rises, more people mine, network hashrate climbs and everyone’s share shrinks. The reverse happens in downturns. Over months these effects partly cancel, which is why mining rarely stays very profitable or very unprofitable for long.

Hardware cost

The tables above ignore what you paid for the machine. Buying a $500 CPU to earn a few dollars a month after power will take many years to pay back on mining alone. The economics work best with hardware you already own or need for something else.

Heat

In winter, a mining PC is an electric heater that pays you back a little. If you would otherwise heat the room with resistive electric heating, the mining power is partly not a cost at all. In summer, the opposite is true if you run air conditioning.

Pool fees and payout costs

P2Pool charges 0% and has no payout fee, according to its README. Centralized pools typically charge around 0.5–1%. Small, frequent payouts also cost a little in transaction fees when you later spend them.

RandomX v2

Monero’s next hard fork, which brings FCMP++, is planned to switch the network to RandomX v2. Early benchmarks published by the P2Pool developer show each v2 hash doing about 53% more work, with raw hashrate on most CPUs falling to roughly 75–100% of today’s figures. Because the whole network shifts at once, your share of rewards should change only slightly. Expect calculators and benchmark tables to need updating, and your dashboard number to drop, after the fork.

Taxes

In many countries, mined coins count as income when you receive them, valued at the market price that day. Keep records of payouts. Our Use & Spend category covers record-keeping basics.

How to check your own numbers

1. Measure your real hashrate. Run XMRig for at least 15 minutes after warm-up and note the 15-minute average.
2. Measure wall power. Use a plug-in power meter; note idle and mining draw.
3. Get current network hashrate from MiningPoolStats and the XMR price from a tracker.
4. Plug them into the formula above or into any RandomX calculator, and include your exact electricity tariff.
5. Compare with reality after a few weeks. If you mine on P2Pool, P2Pool Observer shows your actual payouts.

Ways to improve the result

• Tune for efficiency. Lower your CPU’s power limit until hashes per watt peak. You give up a little hashrate and save much more power.
• Enable huge pages and the MSR mod. Free hashrate is free profit.
• Mine only when power is cheap. Off-peak tariffs or solar surplus can make an unprofitable setup profitable.
• Use P2Pool. 0% fee and you keep block template control.
• Merge mine Tari through P2Pool for a small extra income stream without reducing Monero hashrate.

Warning: Mining on computers you do not own or pay for, such as an employer’s PCs or rented cloud instances on trial credits, is a common way to get fired or banned. Cloud CPU time is almost always more expensive than the XMR it produces.

So, is it worth it?

For most people paying normal residential electricity, Monero mining is roughly break-even to slightly negative in pure dollar terms. It makes sense when power is cheap, when the hardware is already paid for and running, when the heat is useful, or when you value earning XMR directly, without an exchange, and helping secure a decentralized network. If you go in with those expectations and mine through P2Pool, you are likely to be satisfied with the result.