The halving is the one future event in bitcoin whose timing everyone can calculate and whose consequences no one can. This page is the reference half of that sentence: every halving that has happened, with its block height, date, subsidy change and the market numbers around it, plus the schedule ahead. The interpretive half, what halvings mean and do not mean, lives in What Is the Bitcoin Halving and The Bitcoin Cycle, Explained; this page is built to be checked against.
One mechanical note before the table: halvings are scheduled by block height, not calendar date. They occur every 210,000 blocks, and since blocks arrive near but not exactly every ten minutes, future dates are estimates that tighten as the height approaches.
The halving table
Prices rounded, from exchange records of the day; “following peak” is the subsequent cycle high.
| Event | Block height | Date | Subsidy change | Approx. price at event | Following cycle peak |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Launch | 0 | Jan 3, 2009 | 50 BTC/block begins | n/a (no market) | ~$1,150 (Nov 2013) |
| Halving 1 | 210,000 | Nov 28, 2012 | 50 → 25 | ~$12 | ~$1,150 (Nov 2013) |
| Halving 2 | 420,000 | Jul 9, 2016 | 25 → 12.5 | ~$650 | ~$19,700 (Dec 2017) |
| Halving 3 | 630,000 | May 11, 2020 | 12.5 → 6.25 | ~$8,700 | ~$69,000 (Nov 2021) |
| Halving 4 | 840,000 | Apr 20, 2024 | 6.25 → 3.125 | ~$64,000 | ~$116,000 (in the year before Oct 2026) |
| Halving 5 | 1,050,000 | est. spring 2028 | 3.125 → 1.5625 | — | — |
As of mid-October 2026 the chain stood near block 971,572, placing the fifth halving roughly 78,000 blocks out, about a year and a half at the ten-minute pace. Countdown sites track the live estimate; the height itself is the only certainty.
What each halving changed, beyond the subsidy
2012, the proof of concept. The first halving tested whether the schedule would simply execute, and whether miners would keep mining at half pay. Both happened without drama, and the year that followed produced bitcoin’s first mania and first great crash, the ~$1,150 peak of November 2013 and the long bear into 2015.
2016, the industrialization marker. By the second halving mining had become an ASIC industry and the event a media fixture. The slow grind afterward, nothing dramatic for months, then the 2017 vertical to ~$19,700, established the “halvings work with a lag” folklore.
2020, the macro collision. The third halving landed two months after the COVID crash, into the greatest monetary expansion in modern history. The run to ~$69,000 by November 2021 is the cycle where the halving story and the liquidity story became impossible to separate, a confound examined honestly in Bitcoin Correlation.
2024, the ETF-era halving. The fourth broke the script first: bitcoin set a new all-time high near $73,800 in March 2024, before the halving, for the first time ever, powered by the January 2024 launch of US spot ETFs, covered in Bitcoin ETF Flows. It was also the first halving where, briefly, fee revenue spiked above the new subsidy on halving day itself, a preview of the network’s long-term fee question. The cycle that followed carried to roughly $116,000 within the following year and a half, then into the drawdown that had bitcoin near $82,300 on October 15, 2026.
The issuance arithmetic, for the record
Each halving’s effect on supply growth, stated in the terms that matter:
| Period | Subsidy | New BTC per day (approx.) | Annualized supply growth at period start |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009-2012 | 50 | ~7,200 | n/a, then very high |
| 2012-2016 | 25 | ~3,600 | ~12% falling to ~8% |
| 2016-2020 | 12.5 | ~1,800 | ~4% |
| 2020-2024 | 6.25 | ~900 | ~1.8% |
| 2024-2028 | 3.125 | ~450 | ~0.85% |
| 2028-2032 | 1.5625 | ~225 | ~0.4% |
Two readings of that table. The scarcity reading: from the 2024 halving onward bitcoin’s issuance rate sits below gold’s long-run supply growth, and each future halving cuts an already small number, as laid out in How Many Bitcoins Are There?. The diminishing-impact reading: ~450 coins a day, about $37 million at October 2026 prices, is a rounding error next to daily market volumes, so the direct supply shock shrinks toward irrelevance even as the symbolic clock keeps its grip; the tension between those readings is the central argument of The Bitcoin Cycle, Explained.
For miners, the table reads differently again: each row is an overnight halving of their main revenue line, which is why every event has been followed by efficiency purges and consolidation in the industry, visible afterward in Hash Rate data, and why the fee market’s long-term adequacy, discussed in Bitcoin Fees Explained, is the serious question hiding behind the countdown clocks.
The schedule ahead
Halvings continue every 210,000 blocks until the subsidy rounds to zero around the year 2140: 2028 to 1.5625, roughly 2032 to 0.78125, and on down the geometric tail. By the early 2030s over 99 percent of all bitcoin will have been issued. No future halving requires anyone’s approval, announcement or cooperation; the only thing that changes with each one is which questions the market argues about afterward.
On the radar
Bookmark the table, distrust the countdowns’ precision, and when the 2028 estimate tightens to a date, expect this page to update before the commentary industry does. The halvings’ record is exactly what the table shows: a supply schedule that has executed five times for five, and a market that has told a different story around each one.