What are gas fees?

It helps to separate two things that people often lump together. Gas itself is a unit that measures computing work: the network charges a fixed number of units for each step a transaction takes. The fee is that number of units multiplied by a price, and only the price moves with demand. On Ethereum the bill is always settled in ether, which is why even someone sending a dollar stablecoin needs a little ETH in the same wallet.

Units, gwei and the final bill

A plain transfer of ether uses 21,000 units of gas. Anything that runs code, such as a swap or another call to a smart contract, uses more. The price per unit is quoted in gwei, and one gwei is a billionth of an ether.

Take an illustrative case with round numbers rather than live prices. With a base fee of 3 gwei and a tip of 1 gwei, a simple transfer costs 21,000 × 4 = 84,000 gwei, or 0.000084 ETH. The same transfer during a busy hour, with a higher base fee and a bigger tip, can cost many times as much, even though the amount of gas has not changed.

Block explorers publish running estimates for slow, average and fast transactions, so you can check the going rate before you send. Our guide to block explorers shows where to look.

Where the ether ends up

The price per unit has two layers. The base fee is set by the protocol from recent blocks, and that part is burned, which takes it out of circulation for good. The priority fee, or tip, goes to the validator who adds your transaction to a block. This split dates from the London upgrade of 5 August 2021, which brought in EIP-1559.

Every transaction also carries a ceiling on what the sender is willing to pay per unit. When the base fee and tip together come in below that ceiling, the difference is refunded, and so is any gas the transaction did not use.

What pushes the price up

The base fee reacts to how full blocks are. Each block has a target of half its gas limit; after a block above target the base fee can rise by up to 12.5%, and after one below target it falls. In a rush, people also raise their tips to get ahead in the queue.

Complexity matters too, and so do mistakes. ethereum.org explains that a transaction which runs out of gas halfway is reverted, yet the gas it burned through is still charged. Only a transaction rejected before it is included in a block costs nothing.

Other networks, other fee models

• Layer 2 networks. Base, Arbitrum One and OP Mainnet also charge gas in ETH, at a fraction of the price. On 20 October 2026, ethereum.org put the average transaction cost at $0.019 on Ethereum and $0.0016 on the networks backed by it. Our explainer on what a layer 2 is covers why.
• Solana. The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, split evenly between burning and the validator. An optional priority fee, priced per unit of compute, goes to the validator in full. See the Solana network page.
• Bitcoin. Fees depend on the size of the signed transaction in bytes, not on the amount sent. Miners sort waiting transactions by fee per byte and fill blocks from the top, so a minimum fee can mean a long wait. More on the bitcoin page.
• Tokens. Moving a token is paid for in the coin of the network it lives on. The crypto networks overview lists that fee coin for every network.

Gas and your EU platform account

Buying, selling and holding crypto inside a platform account does not involve gas; you pay the platform's own trading fees and spread instead. Gas comes into play once coins leave the platform for an outside address. At that point the platform charges a withdrawal fee meant to cover the network cost, and it can differ hugely by route. Crypto.com's EEA fee table on 20 October 2026 listed 0.005 ETH to withdraw ether over Ethereum and 0.000055 ETH over Base. Our Crypto.com fees guide covers its other charges.

A cheaper route only helps if the receiving wallet supports it for that coin. If it does not, read what to do after sending crypto to the wrong network before you try again.

Once the coins are in your own wallet, you pay gas directly on every transfer. A wallet such as MetaMask shows the network fee before you sign, and it needs a small balance of the network's fee coin to send anything at all.

If you need ether for gas, our ether page shows what it costs on each MiCA-licensed platform for your amount, and the comparer does the same for other coins.