Mining Rig ROI Calculator

This mining rig ROI calculator estimates how long a rig takes to pay for itself. The result is a payback period in days rather than a return percentage: rig cost divided by daily net profit, where net profit is mining revenue less electricity. A rig earning 30 a day net against a 5,000 purchase price recovers its cost in 167 days.

Revenue per terahash per day is the one figure here that has to be looked up rather than read off a spec sheet, and it moves daily. Rig cost is on the invoice, hashrate is on the spec sheet, and electricity follows from wattage times tariff times 24 hours. Revenue per TH tracks coin price and network difficulty, and hashprice indices publish a running figure for it. The revenue figure the fields open with is an illustrative placeholder rather than a market quote. Break-even is the point where revenue covers power: daily electricity divided by hashrate, reported as its own result row. Below that figure the rig is loss-making however long it runs.

Mining ROI risks: (1) coin price falls compress margins directly, since revenue per TH is priced in the coin. (2) Network difficulty rises as competition joins, reducing an individual rig's share of block rewards. (3) Bitcoin halvings cut the block reward in half roughly every four years, a step change in revenue per TH. (4) ASIC obsolescence, as newer generations with better efficiency ratios displace older hardware. (5) Electricity price moves. Retail miners generally pay more per kWh than industrial operations sited near cheap generation, which narrows the margin available at retail scale.

Sample figures

Take a worked example at 100 TH/s: a rig priced at 5,000, revenue of 0.50 per TH per day, and 20 of daily electricity. Gross revenue is 50 a day, net profit is 30 a day, and payback lands at 167 days. Each currency preset scales the three money figures by the same factor, so the payback period stays 167 days whichever currency is selected. These are illustrative figures rather than current market values, and the revenue-per-TH figure in particular changes daily.

The levers in this calculation

Measured at the sample figures, Hashrate (TH/s) and Revenue per TH per Day move Payback Period most, 1.8% per 1%, while Daily Electricity Cost moves it 0.6%. Hashrate and Revenue per TH per Day are the same lever, since they enter only as a product, so a 10% move in either gives the identical answer: in the worked example above, a 10% fall stretches payback from 167 to 200 days and a 10% rise shortens it to 143. Mining Rig Cost moves payback in direct proportion, shifting the answer by 10% either way, which is 17 days at those same figures. The revenue lever is asymmetric, costing 33 days on the downside against 24 saved on the upside, because payback is a reciprocal: a shrinking denominator moves the answer further than a growing one.

Daily Electricity Cost is the input whose rank moves, so it is clearer as proportions than as days, which also makes the comparison hold at any scale. Rig cost shifts payback by 10% at every electricity share. Electricity shifts it by 7.1% when electricity is 40% of gross revenue, 17.6% at 60% and 66.7% at 80%, crossing rig cost at 47.6% on a rise and 52.6% on a fall. Below the crossover electricity is the weakest of the four inputs; above it, electricity outranks rig cost, though never the revenue lever, which stays the strongest at every share. The worked example sits at 40%, so electricity ranks last there, worth 12 days on a 10% rise and 10 days on a 10% fall. That share climbs toward the crossover either because electricity rises or because revenue per terahash falls, so a rig running close to break-even is in the inverted regime by definition.

How the math works

Gross daily revenue is hashrate multiplied by revenue per terahash: in the worked example above, 100 × 0.50 = 50. Daily net profit subtracts electricity: 50 − 20 = 30. Payback days is rig cost divided by daily net profit, 5,000 ÷ 30 = 166.7, rounded up to 167. Rounding goes up rather than to nearest because a rig does not reach payback part-way through a day. Where electricity meets or exceeds gross revenue the net is zero or negative, no payback point exists, and the calculator returns a loss-making state instead of a day count. The monthly row uses a 30-day month and the annual row uses 365 days, so the monthly figure multiplied by twelve does not match the annual one.