A Bitcoin mining pool combines hashrate from many miners so the group finds blocks regularly and splits the reward, instead of each miner waiting years for a lucky solo block. In 2026 a handful of pools produce most blocks: Foundry USA and AntPool together typically account for roughly 40–50% of network hashrate, followed by F2Pool, ViaBTC, SpiderPool and MARA Pool. But the biggest pool is not automatically the best one for you. Pool access, payout method, fee, minimum payout and how much control you get over block templates matter more, especially for home and small-farm miners.
New to this topic? Our Bitcoin hub lays out the options and links every related guide.
- Pool shares shift weekly. Check live distribution on a block explorer such as mempool.space or Hashrate Index rather than trusting any fixed list.
- FPPS gives steady daily pay, with the pool absorbing luck; PPLNS and TIDES pay according to actual blocks found, usually for a lower fee.
- Published fees run from 0% (some PPLNS) to about 4%; large industrial miners negotiate private rates.
- Some big pools are closed or KYC-gated. Foundry requires onboarding and MARA Pool mines for Marathon itself.
- Decentralisation tools now exist. Stratum V2 and OCEAN’s DATUM let miners build their own block templates.
Top Bitcoin Mining Pools List for 2026
The figures below reflect public data and pool fee pages in the second half of 2026. Hashrate share is approximate and moves with each difficulty period. Fee schedules also change, so confirm on the pool’s own site before pointing machines at it.
| Pool | Approx. hashrate share | Payout methods | Fee model | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foundry USA | Roughly 25–35% (largest) | FPPS | Private, tiered by hashrate | US institutional and large commercial miners; KYC onboarding |
| AntPool | Roughly 15–20% | FPPS, PPLNS | Published; PPLNS lower than FPPS | Bitmain hardware owners, miners who want a PPLNS option |
| F2Pool | Roughly 10–18% | FPPS, PPLNS | Published; FPPS has historically been among the higher rates | Global miners, multi-coin operations |
| ViaBTC | Roughly 10% | PPS+, PPLNS, solo | Published; varies by method | Miners who want many payout modes, including solo |
| SpiderPool | Roughly 5–10% | FPPS | Published | Mainly Asia-based miners |
| MARA Pool | Roughly 5% | FPPS | Private | Not open to outside miners |
| Luxor | Low single digits | FPPS | Published, with custom institutional tiers | US miners wanting firmware, hashrate and hedging products |
| Braiins Pool | Low single digits | FPPS | 2.5% (per Braiins documentation) | Home and small miners; free Lightning payouts |
| OCEAN | Low single digits | TIDES | 2%, or 1% for miners running DATUM | Miners who want non-custodial payouts and template control |
Two practical points from that table. First, the “best Bitcoin mining pool” by size (Foundry) is not a sign-up-and-go option for a hobbyist with one machine. Second, the pools most friendly to small miners are generally the mid-sized and smaller ones, which also helps keep block production less concentrated.
How Pool Payouts Work (With Real Numbers)
Miners prove their work to the pool by submitting “shares”: hashes that meet an easier target than the real network difficulty. Shares are a fair proxy for how much hashing you contributed. The payout method decides how shares turn into bitcoin.
The payout methods in plain English
- FPPS (Full Pay Per Share): the pool pays you a fixed expected value for every share, covering both the block subsidy and an estimate of transaction fees, whether or not the pool actually finds a block. You get smooth daily income; the pool carries the variance, which is why FPPS fees are higher.
- PPS+: a hybrid. The block subsidy is paid per share like PPS, while transaction fees are shared based on blocks actually found.
- PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares): when the pool finds a block, the reward is split among the last N shares submitted. If the pool has an unlucky week, you earn less; a lucky week pays more. Over the long run it averages out, and fees are lower, sometimes 0%.
- TIDES (OCEAN): a PPLNS-style method using a window of roughly eight blocks’ worth of shares, with payouts written directly into the block’s coinbase transaction to miners’ own addresses. The pool never holds your balance.
- Solo or “lottery” mode: some pools (ViaBTC, and community services such as solo CKPool) let you mine alone through their infrastructure. You keep almost the whole reward if you find a block, which for small miners is extremely unlikely.
Worked example: one modern ASIC
Take a single machine producing 200 TH/s, and assume total network hashrate of about 1,000 EH/s, roughly where it sat in autumn 2026. Your share of the network is 200 TH/s divided by 1,000,000,000 TH/s, or 0.00002%.
- The network finds about 144 blocks a day, each with a 3.125 BTC subsidy since the April 2024 halving. That is about 450 BTC of new coins daily.
- Your expected share is about 0.00009 BTC a day (roughly 9,000 satoshis), plus a little extra from transaction fees.
- On FPPS with a 2.5% fee, you would receive about 8,775 sats of that 9,000. On a 0% PPLNS pool you keep it all on average, but daily payouts will swing.
- Mining solo, you would expect to find a block once every 35,000 days or so, nearly a century. You might get lucky next week; you probably won’t in your lifetime.
That is why pools exist. It also shows that a 1–2 percentage point fee difference matters less than your electricity price. Whether those 9,000 sats cover your power bill is the real question, and our guide to whether bitcoin mining is profitable walks through the calculation.
Solo Bitcoin Mining vs Pool Mining
Solo Bitcoin mining means your machines try to find a whole block on their own and keep the full reward of 3.125 BTC plus fees, while pool mining shares rewards in small, regular payments. For anyone without a very large fleet, solo mining is a lottery: the expected income is about the same as in a pool, but you will most likely earn nothing at all.
Block discovery is random and memoryless, so the odds below don’t improve the longer you wait. They assume network hashrate of about 1,000 EH/s and roughly 144 blocks a day; as hashrate rises, the odds get worse.
| Setup (approx. hashrate) | Chance of a block per day | Average wait for one block | Chance in a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| NerdMiner (~78 KH/s) | Effectively zero | Hundreds of billions of years | Effectively zero |
| Bitaxe Gamma (~1.2 TH/s) | About 1 in 5.8 million | About 16,000 years | About 0.006% |
| Avalon Nano 3S (~6 TH/s) | About 1 in 1.2 million | About 3,200 years | About 0.03% |
| Antminer S21 Pro (~234 TH/s) | About 1 in 30,000 | About 80 years | About 1.2% |
| 1 PH/s (a small farm, or rented hashrate) | About 1 in 6,900 | About 19 years | About 5% |
Solo mining pools such as CKPool
Few people solo mine by running their own full node and block-template software. Most point their hardware at a solo pool, which provides the infrastructure but pays the entire block reward to whichever miner finds it. The best known is solo CKPool (solo.ckpool.org), which takes a 2% fee on a found block and lets you use your Bitcoin address as the username. ViaBTC also offers a solo mode. If you never find a block, you earn nothing: there are no partial payouts in solo mining.
Recent solo block finds
Solo wins do happen, which keeps interest alive. In November 2025 a miner reported at about 6 TH/s found a block through solo CKPool; the pool’s creator, Con Kolivas, put the odds at around 1 in 180 million per block. In April 2026 a miner with roughly 70 TH/s found CKPool’s 313th solo block, and in August 2026 its 317th solo block went to a miner using rented hashrate that reportedly peaked near 100 PH/s, far beyond any home setup. Remember survivorship bias: headlines cover the winners, not the thousands of solo miners who paid for electricity and found nothing.
Bitcoin Lottery Mining
Bitcoin lottery mining means running a small, low-power miner on a solo pool for the slim chance of winning a whole block, rather than for income. Devices like the open-source Bitaxe (about 1.2 TH/s at 15–20 W) and the even tinier ESP32-based NerdMiner (about 78 KH/s at roughly 1 W) are built for exactly this.
Treat it like a lottery ticket you pay for in electricity. A Bitaxe uses only around 0.4 kWh a day, so the running cost is small, but its odds of finding a block in a year are well under one in ten thousand, and a NerdMiner’s are effectively zero; it is a learning toy. In a regular pool, the same Bitaxe would earn only about 50 satoshis a day, a few cents that may take years to reach a payout threshold, which is why many owners prefer the lottery. Our budget Bitcoin mining guide compares small devices in more detail.
How to Choose a Mining Pool
If you mine at home with one to a few machines
- Payout threshold and method: a low minimum payout, or Lightning payouts, gets small balances into your wallet instead of sitting on the pool. Braiins pays out over Lightning with no payout fee; OCEAN pays directly in each block it finds.
- Open registration: pick a pool that accepts small miners without institutional onboarding.
- Server location: choose a stratum endpoint near you to reduce latency and stale shares.
- Simplicity: FPPS is easiest to reason about if you track earnings against electricity costs month by month.
If you run a commercial operation
- Negotiated fees: above a certain hashrate, every large pool will quote custom terms.
- Reporting and compliance: SOC 2 attestations, API access and tax reporting become important. Foundry and Luxor emphasise these.
- Counterparty risk: on FPPS the pool owes you money every day. Spread hashrate across two pools if a single pool’s failure would be material.
- Extras: some pools offer hashprice hedges, firmware, or hosting relationships.
If you care about Bitcoin’s decentralisation
In a traditional pool, the pool operator, not you, chooses which transactions go into a block. With a few pools producing most blocks, a small number of companies effectively decide block contents. Two developments address this:
- Stratum V2 is an upgraded mining protocol that encrypts miner–pool traffic and allows miners to build their own block templates. Braiins co-developed it, and in May 2026 several major pools, including Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool and MARA, joined a working group supporting it. Adoption of the template-building part is still early.
- DATUM, OCEAN’s protocol, lets miners construct templates with their own Bitcoin node, and OCEAN charges a lower fee to miners who use it.
Pointing hashrate at a smaller pool or using these tools has a modest cost in convenience or variance, but it is the most direct thing an individual miner can do about concentration.
Setting Up Pool Mining
- Get suitable hardware. Only SHA-256 ASICs are competitive for Bitcoin. Our bitcoin mining hardware guide compares current models.
- Create a pool account (or, for OCEAN, simply use your Bitcoin address as the username).
- Open the miner’s web interface and enter the pool’s stratum URL, your worker name and any password. Add a second and third pool URL as failovers.
- Set a payout address you control, ideally in a self-custody wallet, and enable 2FA on the pool account.
- Monitor the pool dashboard for hashrate, rejected and stale shares, and earnings. A rejected rate that stays above a couple of percent usually points to network or configuration problems.
New to all this? Start with our broader bitcoin mining guide before buying hardware.
To connect your hardware to a pool, you will need the right program, and our guide to crypto mining software for ASIC, GPU and CPU compares the main choices.
Mining Pool Risks
- Custodial balances: most pools hold your earnings until you hit the payout threshold. Pools can be hacked, freeze accounts or shut down; withdraw regularly.
- Fee and term changes: pools can change fees, minimums or KYC rules with little notice.
- Regional access: some pools restrict users in certain jurisdictions, and exchange-linked pools inherit the exchange’s identity requirements.
- Downtime: configure backup pools so a stratum outage does not leave machines idle.
- Tax: in the US, mining rewards are generally taxed as income at fair market value when received, and selling later creates a separate capital gain or loss. See our crypto tax guide.
FAQ
Which Bitcoin mining pool pays the most?
Over long periods, pools mostly differ by fee and payout method rather than luck. A low-fee PPLNS or TIDES pool usually pays a little more on average than a higher-fee FPPS pool, but with more day-to-day variance. For most small miners the fee gap is worth a few percent of revenue, while electricity costs decide whether mining is profitable at all.
Is Foundry USA the best mining pool?
It is the largest by hashrate and serves big institutional miners well, with FPPS payouts and compliance features. But it requires onboarding and its fees are privately negotiated, so it is not designed for someone with one machine at home. Smaller miners usually find open pools like Braiins, ViaBTC, AntPool or OCEAN more practical.
Can I switch mining pools?
Yes. Change the stratum URL in your miner’s settings and it starts working for the new pool within minutes. There is no lock-in. Withdraw or note any unpaid balance on the old pool first; on PPLNS pools, switching means giving up shares that have not yet been paid out in a block.
What does PPC mean in mining pools?
Usually it refers to Peercoin (PPC), a coin that uses the same SHA-256 algorithm as Bitcoin combined with proof of stake. Bitcoin ASICs can mine it, and some multi-coin pools support it, but its block rewards are far smaller than Bitcoin’s. In payout contexts, people sometimes mistype PPS (pay per share) as PPC.
Do I need a pool to mine Bitcoin?
No, solo mining is allowed, but with a single modern ASIC you would statistically wait decades to find a block. Pools turn that lottery into a small, regular income. Solo mining only makes sense for very large operations or for people treating it as a deliberate long-shot gamble.
Is solo Bitcoin mining worth it?
Financially, almost never for a home miner. Your long-run expected earnings are similar to pool mining, but with a single ASIC you would wait about 80 years on average for one block, and you could easily earn nothing for life. Solo mining makes sense only as a deliberate gamble with hardware you would run anyway, or for operations large enough to find blocks regularly.
What is the best solo Bitcoin mining pool?
Solo CKPool is the most widely used option for home solo miners, with a 2% fee only when you find a block and no account needed. ViaBTC also offers a solo mode. Whichever you choose, check that it pays the reward directly to your own address and has a public record of found blocks.
Can a Bitaxe find a Bitcoin block?
Yes, it is possible, but at about 1.2 TH/s and a network near 1,000 EH/s, a single Bitaxe has roughly a 1 in 5.8 million chance per day, an average wait of about 16,000 years. Running several units improves the odds only proportionally.
Crypto is volatile and risky; this is education, not financial advice. Do your own research.
