Bitcoin transaction stuck? Here is what to do.

The panic is always the same. You sent Bitcoin, the wallet says pending, and an hour later it still says pending. Somewhere in a browser tab there is a block explorer showing your transaction sitting there doing nothing, and every search result is trying to sell you an accelerator.

Take a breath first, because the most important fact is this: your coins have not moved and they cannot be lost this way. An unconfirmed transaction is a proposal, not a payment. Until a miner puts it in a block, those coins are still yours and still controlled by your keys. Every outcome from here ends with you either getting the payment through or getting the coins back.

First, check whether it is actually stuck

Before anything else, look up your transaction ID on a block explorer. Three outcomes, and two of them end the problem immediately.

It says confirmed

Then it is done and nothing is wrong. Wallets and exchanges often lag behind the chain, sometimes by a long way, because many services wait for three or six confirmations before updating a balance. If the chain says confirmed, the Bitcoin part of this is finished and any remaining delay belongs to whoever is receiving.

It says unconfirmed, with a fee rate

This is the real case, and the rest of this article is about it. Note the fee rate. You will need it in a moment.

The explorer cannot find it at all

Different problem, different fix, and it is the one case where rebroadcasting is genuinely the right tool. Go straight to the guide on transactions that vanished.

Why congestion is almost never the answer in 2026

Nearly every guide still explains stuck transactions the same way. The network is busy, blocks are full, your fee was too low for the competition, wait it out. That was true in 2017, and again during the inscription boom, and it is not true now.

Here is the live mempool as this page loads:

Look at the third number. The backlog is enormous and almost none of it is real competition. Roughly 69 percent of everything waiting sits in a narrow band between 0.1 and 0.2 sat/vB. The entire mempool holds about 0.10 BTC in fees between all of those transactions. We take that apart properly in why the mempool is full but fees are 1 sat/vB.

So when an accelerator shows you a screenshot of a huge queue and implies you are stuck in traffic, the screenshot is accurate and the implication is false. If you are paying 1 sat/vB you are ahead of about 98 percent of that queue.

The five real causes, ranked

These are the things that actually strand a transaction now, in the order we see them.

Cause one: you are parked at the relay floor

This is the big one, and it is new enough that most advice has not caught up.

In September 2025, Bitcoin Core 29.1 lowered the default minimum relay fee from 1 sat/vB to 0.1 sat/vB. That is the cheapest a transaction can be and still be passed around by nodes. Wallets that offer an economy or slow option started letting people broadcast at rates close to that floor.

The result is a standing queue that does not clear. New floor rate transactions arrive at roughly the pace old ones leave, so the band never drains. If your transaction is in that band, waiting is not a strategy. It can genuinely sit there for the full fourteen days and then be discarded.

Cause two: an unconfirmed parent is holding you back

Miners do not score transactions in isolation. If your transaction spends coins from another transaction that has not confirmed yet, the two are evaluated together as a package, and the package rate is what counts.

This catches people out constantly, because your own transaction can look perfectly well funded while the package it belongs to is dragging along at a fraction of that. A transaction paying 5 sat/vB that depends on a parent paying 0.2 will be treated roughly like the parent.

Bumping your own transaction here does nothing useful. The parent is the anchor, so the fix has to lift the whole package. In practice that means CPFP, or replacing the parent if it is yours to replace.

What changed in Bitcoin Core 31

Core 31.0 in April 2026 replaced the old ancestor and descendant limits with a cluster mempool design, capping connected groups at 64 transactions. Long chains of unconfirmed spends behave differently now than the older guides describe, and the CPFP carve-out that used to allow one extra child is gone.

Cause three: the network never received it

Wallet broadcasts fail quietly more often than people expect. A phone drops connection at the wrong second. A node rejects the transaction on a policy rule and the wallet does not surface the error. A desktop wallet sits behind a firewall that blocks outbound peer connections. In each case your wallet shows the payment as sent and the network never saw it.

The symptom is unmistakable: no block explorer can find the transaction ID at all. Not unconfirmed, not pending, simply not there.

This is the one situation where a rebroadcast service is exactly the right tool, and it costs nothing. Our free relay pushes to twenty independent nodes and shows you which ones accepted it.

Cause four: it was dropped after fourteen days

Nodes do not hold unconfirmed transactions forever. Bitcoin Core discards them after 336 hours, which is fourteen days. Nodes also evict the lowest paying transactions early when the mempool hits its memory limit.

Once it is dropped, the coins are spendable again and your wallet balance should return to normal. You can simply make the payment again at a sensible fee.

Cause five: it already confirmed

Worth stating plainly because it is more common than it sounds. Wallet software caches, exchanges wait for extra confirmations before crediting, and people occasionally look up the wrong transaction ID entirely. Check the chain before you spend money solving a problem that has already solved itself.

The fix that works most often: Replace-By-Fee

If you sent the transaction and your fee is too low, this is your answer. RBF re-signs the same payment with a higher fee, and the new version replaces the old one across the network.

The old advice here is out of date in a way that matters. Guides still tell you to check whether your transaction was flagged as replaceable when you made it. Since Bitcoin Core 28 shipped full RBF, every unconfirmed transaction is replaceable regardless of any flag. The only remaining question is whether your wallet exposes the button.

Aim slightly above the current next-block rate rather than dramatically above it. Overpaying by ten times does not get you mined ten times faster. If the transaction came out of an exchange you cannot bump it at all, and the exchange withdrawal guide covers what actually works there.

The fix for receivers: Child Pays For Parent

If somebody sent you a slow payment, you cannot replace their transaction because you do not have their keys. What you can do is spend the incoming output in a new transaction that pays generously. Miners evaluate the pair together, so a well funded child pulls its parent into the block with it.

What rebroadcasting can and cannot do

Since every result for this problem offers to rebroadcast, it is worth being precise about when that helps.

• It helps when the network never received your transaction.
• It helps when the transaction was dropped and needs to re-enter mempools.
• It does nothing when every node already holds your transaction, which is the normal case for something that has been sitting unconfirmed for hours.

Resending a transaction that is already everywhere does not raise its fee, does not change its position, and does not make a miner more likely to choose it. We go through the mechanics in our investigation of whether accelerators actually work.

What not to do

• Do not give anyone your seed phrase. Nothing about unsticking a transaction requires your keys. Any site asking is stealing from you.
• Do not send the payment again from scratch while the first one is still live, unless you understand that both could confirm. Replace it instead.
• Do not pay for acceleration before checking your fee rate. A large share of paid accelerations we measured were bought for transactions already priced for the next block.
• Do not trust a phone number in a search result. Fake support numbers are a common scam on exactly these queries, and the scam guide covers the pattern.
• Do not panic about the fourteen day expiry. It returns your coins, it does not consume them.

The bottom line

Check whether it is actually stuck before doing anything, because a good share of these end there. If it is unconfirmed, look at the fee rate. Above the current next-block rate means wait and keep your money. Below it means act, and acting usually costs a few hundred satoshis from your own wallet.

The version of this problem that made accelerators worth buying, a genuinely full network with real bidding for block space, has not existed for over a year. What exists instead is a relay floor that traps cheap transactions permanently. That is a fee problem with a fee solution, and you can do it yourself.