What is the expected value of solo mining Monero?
The expected value of solo mining Monero is your share of the network’s mining power multiplied by the rewards it produces, minus your costs. That is a long-run average, not a payment schedule: you could mine for months or years without finding a block, even when your calculated expected earnings are positive.
Calculate your expected reward
When you solo mine, you try to find a valid block yourself. A block is a batch of transactions added to Monero’s record. If you find one accepted by the network, you receive its mining reward rather than sharing it with a pool.
Your hashrate is how many mining calculations your device performs per second. Using the same units for your rate and the network rate:
Expected XMR per day = (your hashrate ÷ network hashrate) × 720 × average block reward
Monero targets one block about every two minutes, or roughly 720 blocks per day. Its ongoing base reward is 0.6 XMR per block, plus transaction fees. Ignoring fees, that simplifies to:
Expected XMR per day ≈ (your hashrate ÷ network hashrate) × 432
Use your sustained hashrate, not a brief peak. Check a live explorer or calculator for current network conditions. Mining difficulty—the measure of how hard finding a block is—adjusts every block, so today’s estimate is not a forecast you can rely on indefinitely.
Understand what the average hides
Suppose, purely as an example, your setup provides one-millionth of the network’s hashrate. Ignoring transaction fees, your expected gross reward would be:
- 0.000432 XMR per day
- About 0.158 XMR per year
- One block every 1,389 days on average, roughly 3.8 years
Those figures assume your share stays constant and you mine continuously. They are not estimates for a particular device.
Most importantly, “one block every 3.8 years” does not mean a block arrives on that schedule. Under steady conditions, after one average waiting period, you would still have about a 37% chance of finding no blocks.
Mining does not remember how long you have waited. A long losing streak does not make your next calculation more likely to win.
Turn expected rewards into expected profit
Your expected reward is not the same as your expected profit.
Expected daily profit = expected daily XMR × XMR price − daily costs
Use a live price rather than a fixed price assumption. Your costs can include:
- Electricity used while mining.
- Extra cooling.
- Hardware wear and any equipment you buy.
- Fees charged by services you use.
For electricity, multiply your measured power use in kilowatts by mining hours and your electricity price per kilowatt-hour. For an existing computer, distinguish its normal power use from the extra power mining adds.
Compare solo mining fairly
At equal effective hashrate, solo and pool mining have broadly similar expected gross rewards before fees and operational losses. A pool combines miners’ work and distributes rewards, making your payments more frequent and smaller.
Solo mining changes the uncertainty, not the underlying reward rate. Browser mining often delivers much less effective performance than dedicated Monero mining software, so calculate using measured browser performance. Confirm that the service actually offers solo mining, too.
If you find a block, newly mined Monero remains locked for 60 blocks—about two hours at the target rate.
The bottom line
Judge solo mining by both its expected profit and your chance of receiving nothing during your planned mining period. A positive average can still mean a very unlikely payout for you.
