Mining hosting rates in 2026: what hosts really charge per kWh

Almost every mining decision reduces to one number, and it is not the price of the machine. It is the price of a kilowatt-hour.

A 13 J/TH miner breaks even at roughly $0.122/kWh with Bitcoin near $78,000. Below that you make money; above it you lose money every hour the machine is switched on, and no amount of efficiency shopping fixes it. So the only question that really matters when you compare hosting providers is what they charge per kWh — and, more importantly, what that rate actually covers.

This page is a benchmark. It sets out what US hosts charge, what industrial power actually costs by region, what the largest public miners genuinely pay, and where the offshore rates sit. Everything checked in the first week of September 2026. If you want the mechanics of how hosting billing works — deposits, curtailment, uptime terms — that is in our hosting cost breakdown and our contracts guide. This one is about the number itself.

The benchmark, in one table

Three things fall out of that immediately.

US retail hosting costs roughly twice what a gigawatt-scale operator pays. Riot's 3.6 cents is not a rate you can get as a retail customer, and any host quoting you something close to it is either running a genuinely exceptional power contract or is not telling you what else you will be billed for. The gap between 3.6 cents and 6.5–8 cents is the host's margin, overhead and risk premium, and it is a legitimate cost of not having to build a substation yourself.

The US industrial grid average is now roughly the same as retail hosting. US electricity prices rose about 9% year on year into 2026, and the industrial sector average sits close to 8.5–9 cents. That squeeze is why US hosts have been raising rates and why several have quietly stopped publishing them.

European grid power is not competitive for mining at any tier. The EU industrial average of €0.1837/kWh is roughly $0.21 — well above the ~$0.122 break-even for a current-generation machine. Even Finland, the cheapest grid in the bloc at €0.0748, is above what a US host charges all-in. Our country-by-country guide has the full Eurostat table.

What "all-in" actually means — and where quotes go wrong

Two hosts quoting "$0.07/kWh" can bill you very differently. Before you compare anything, establish which of these are inside the number:

• Power at the meter versus power plus PUE overhead. A facility with heavy cooling can consume 5–10% more than your machines draw. Ask whether you are billed on machine draw or facility draw.
• Management fee — sometimes a separate per-machine monthly charge, sometimes rolled into the kWh rate, sometimes a percentage of mined output.
• Repairs and spares. Some hosts include labour and charge for parts; some charge for both; some charge nothing and simply leave a dead machine unplugged.
• Curtailment credits. In Texas especially, hosts earn money by shutting machines off during grid stress. Whether those credits flow back to you, are kept by the host, or are split is one of the largest single variables in a contract and it is rarely on the pricing page.
• Setup and deposit. A per-miner onboarding fee plus a security deposit of typically two to three months of power is standard. That is working capital you do not get back until you leave.
• Pool fees and payout thresholds sit outside all of this — see our pool guide for what those actually cost you.

A useful test when you get a quote: ask for a sample invoice from a real customer month, redacted. Hosts who bill cleanly produce it immediately.

How offshore rates compare

A competitor published its full rate card publicly in April 2026, which is unusually transparent and makes a good reference point for what the offshore market charges retail customers:

Note the structure: the "no service fees" US option is more expensive per kWh than the standard US option. That is the trade being made explicit — you either pay a lower kWh rate and separate fees, or a higher kWh rate with fees folded in. Neither is inherently better; they are just different ways of splitting the same bill, and you cannot compare them on the headline number alone.

Our own facilities are in Bhutan, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Trinidad & Tobago, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Paraguay, Iceland, Georgia, Norway, Canada, Finland, Texas and the UAE. Current per-kWh rates and capacity status for each are listed on the hosting page, since they change with capacity and contract terms and we would rather you saw the live figure than a number in an article.

Why a host can be cheaper than the local grid

This is the part worth understanding properly, because it is also how you tell a real offshore rate from a fictional one.

Hosts serving low single-digit cent rates are not buying at retail tariff. They are buying stranded or surplus generation — hydro that would otherwise spill in the wet season, gas that would otherwise be flared, geothermal or wind output in a grid with no transmission capacity to move it somewhere useful. That power has a near-zero opportunity cost to the generator, which is why it can be sold far below the published industrial tariff.

The corollary is the risk. Stranded power is stranded because something is constrained, and constraints move:

• Seasonality. Hydro surplus in Bhutan, Laos or Paraguay is a wet-season phenomenon. Dry-season curtailment is normal, not a failure.
• Policy. Kazakhstan restricted miner grid access during a power shortage; Iceland's grid operator has repeatedly curtailed industrial load; China banned mining outright in 2021. Cheap power attracts miners, miners attract attention, and attention attracts rules.
• Counterparty. Your machine is physically in someone else's building, in a jurisdiction whose courts you have never used.

So the honest way to read a very low rate is not "too good to be true" and not "free money" — it is a lower price in exchange for curtailment risk and jurisdiction risk. Ask any host what their curtailed hours were last year, by month. A host that tracks it will tell you. Our uptime and SLA guide covers what a defensible guarantee looks like.

The risk nobody prices in

Hosting concentrates a real risk that home mining does not have: your hardware is an asset sitting on someone else's balance sheet risk. The sector has a track record here and it is worth knowing before you sign.

Compass Mining's 2022 dispute over its Maine facility left customer machines inaccessible while the commercial argument played out. Core Scientific's Chapter 11 forced hosting customers to negotiate as creditors. Neither company was a fly-by-night operation; both were among the largest names in the business at the time.

What that means in practice, and what to insist on:

• Serial-number-level records that identify your specific machines as your property, not fungible inventory.
• A written statement of what happens on insolvency — whether your hardware is segregated customer property or part of the estate.
• A defined exit. Notice period, de-racking cost, who arranges shipping, and how long it takes.
• What happens if you fall behind on payments. Most contracts let the host power down and eventually sell your machine to recover arrears. Know the threshold and the timeline before you need to.

These are not exotic asks. Any host that resists all four is telling you something.

Working the numbers for your own case

Take a 270 Th/s machine drawing 3,510 W — an S21 XP class unit at 13 J/TH. It consumes 84.2 kWh a day and grosses roughly $10.30 a day at current hashprice.

The whole spread between a good outcome and a ruinous one is about eight cents per kilowatt-hour. Two cents on the rate is roughly $50 a month per machine — which is why the difference between a 7-cent quote and a 9-cent quote deserves more scrutiny than the difference between two machines with similar efficiency.

Also note the row that says break-even. At $0.122/kWh a current-generation machine earns nothing. Every older machine breaks even lower: CoinShares estimated that 15–20% of the global fleet is underwater at 6 cents/kWh or above, and that an S19 XP's break-even electricity price fell from about $0.12/kWh in December 2024 to $0.077/kWh a year later. Difficulty growth pushes that threshold down every month.

How to actually compare two quotes

A short checklist that will settle most comparisons in ten minutes:

1. Get the all-in number. Ask for total monthly cost for one machine of a stated model, including every fee. Not $/kWh — dollars per month.
2. Divide by expected kWh. Machine watts × 24 × 30 ÷ 1,000. That gives you the real effective rate, which is the only comparable figure.
3. Ask for last year's uptime, by month. Not the SLA — the actual figure.
4. Ask who keeps curtailment revenue.
5. Ask what happens on insolvency and on arrears.
6. Ask for the exit terms in writing before you ship anything.

Then put the effective rate into the profitability model alongside the machine you are actually considering. If the answer only works at the host's headline rate and not at their all-in rate, you have your answer.

If you are still deciding whether to host at all rather than run machines at home, our home versus hosted comparison works through both sides, and the business colocation guide covers larger deployments. Current rates and capacity for each of our facilities are on the hosting page.

Sources: Riot Platforms and MARA Holdings Q2 2026 SEC filings; US Energy Information Administration retail electricity price data 2026; Eurostat non-household and household electricity prices, H2 2025 (dataset nrg_pc_205); CoinShares Bitcoin Mining Report Q1 2026; published 2026 rate cards and pricing guidance from MiningStore, Simple Mining, Abundant Mines and OneMiners; Luxor Hashrate Index for hashprice. Checked September 2026. Hosting rates change with capacity, term and power contract — treat every figure here as a benchmark, not a quote. Mining income is never guaranteed.