01 · Before you pay
Check the transaction before you pay anyone
The short version: most Bitcoin transactions that feel stuck are not stuck. In the current fee market, anything paying about 1 sat/vB or more is normally already in line for the next block. Paying an accelerator for a transaction like that buys you nothing. Run the check above first. It is free and takes a few seconds.
Every accelerator on the internet wants you to believe your transaction is in trouble, because worried people pay. We built StuckBTC to do the opposite job first. The scope reads your transaction from the public mempool, computes the effective fee rate including any unconfirmed parents, compares it against what the next block is actually accepting right now, and gives you a plain verdict. When the verdict says wait, you wait and keep your money. When it says act, we show you the cheapest honest fix and its exact cost in sats, next to what a paid accelerator would quote for the same job.
Blocks arrive on average every ten minutes, but the gap is random. Thirty or forty quiet minutes happen all the time and mean nothing is wrong. That single fact would save Bitcoin users a lot of accelerator fees if more sites said it out loud.
02 · The relay
How this free Bitcoin transaction accelerator works
When you press Transmit, StuckBTC fetches your raw transaction and pushes it again to 20 independent Bitcoin nodes: public Esplora and mempool instances run by different operators in different countries, plus the push endpoints of the major block explorers. Each node answers for itself, and the scope shows you exactly what each one said. Accepted means the node took the transaction and is relaying it. Already held means the node knew it before we arrived, which is good news, your transaction has propagated. A node that is out of date or unreachable gets flagged in yellow or red, because a dead node cannot help you and we are not going to pretend it can.
What rebroadcasting can and cannot do
Honesty first: if all 20 nodes already hold your transaction, rebroadcasting it changes nothing, and no accelerator on earth can change that by resending it harder. Rebroadcasting earns its keep in two situations. First, when a wallet broadcast silently failed and the transaction never actually reached the network. Second, when the transaction sat unconfirmed for 14 days, got dropped from mempools, and needs to be reintroduced so miners can see it again. In both cases a wide push to many well connected nodes is exactly the right tool, and that is what this site does.
If your transaction was dropped and your wallet still shows it, you can paste the raw transaction hex into the box instead of the txid. We push the full transaction back into the mempool through all 20 nodes.
What the diagnosis checks
Confirmed already
A surprising number of stuck transactions are already confirmed. We check first and tell you, so you stop worrying in five seconds.
Effective fee rate
Not the naive fee divided by size, but the package rate including unconfirmed ancestors, the same number miners actually use.
Next block threshold
Live from the public mempool: the lowest fee rate that is currently making it into the next block template.
Unconfirmed parents
If a parent transaction is the anchor, bumping your own transaction does nothing, and we say so.
The shortfall in sats
When a bump is needed, we compute what it actually costs. It is usually pocket change.
03 · The real cause
Why your Bitcoin transaction is really stuck in 2026
The queue, block by block. The median fee rate of each block the mempool would fill right now, live from mempool.space. The first one clears at the recommended rate. Everything behind it is fee dust that miners never need to reach.
LiveThe old story about stuck BTC was congestion: too many transactions, not enough block space, fees spiking, and everyone below the spike waiting. That story is over for now. Across the last twelve months of blocks, the median block fee rate reached 5 sat/vB less than one percent of the time and never touched 10. The recommended fee has sat at 1 sat/vB for months. The mempool looks huge, around 44 blocks deep right now, but almost all of that queue is dust that will never compete with you.
Here is what actually happened. In September 2025, Bitcoin Core 29.1 lowered the default minimum relay fee from 1 sat/vB to 0.1 sat/vB. Wallets started letting people broadcast at economy rates near that floor. The result is a permanent standing queue. As measured today, 69 percent of all waiting transactions sit in the 0.1 to 0.2 sat/vB band, refilling as fast as it drains, and only 2.12 percent of the entire mempool pays more than 1 sat/vB.
So the modern stuck transaction is not a victim of congestion. It is a transaction priced at the relay floor, parked behind 44 blocks of identical fee dust, with no natural way out. Waiting rarely fixes it. Rebroadcasting does not fix it either, because every node already has it. What fixes it is raising the fee, and raising the fee usually costs a few hundred sats. The next section shows you how.
The other real causes we see, in order: an unconfirmed parent holding a child hostage, a broadcast that silently failed and never propagated, and a transaction dropped after the 14 day mempool expiry. The scope detects each of these and names the one you have, and we walk through all five in what to do when a transaction is stuck.
04 · The fix
Unstuck BTC the right way: RBF and CPFP
When the diagnosis says your fee genuinely is too low, you have two clean fixes, both of which you do from your own wallet, and both of which cost a tiny fraction of any paid acceleration service.
Replace By Fee, for the sender
RBF re signs the same payment with a higher fee. The new version replaces the old one in every mempool. Since Bitcoin Core 28 shipped full RBF, every unconfirmed transaction on the network is replaceable, so the old question of whether your transaction opted in no longer matters. The only question left is whether your wallet exposes the button.
Child Pays For Parent, for the receiver
CPFP is the fix when you are on the receiving end, or when you control a change output. You spend an output of the stuck transaction in a new transaction that pays a high fee. Miners weigh parent and child together as a package, so your child fee drags the parent into a block with it.
| Wallet | Bump fee, RBF | CPFP | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrum | Yes | Yes | Right click the transaction, Increase fee |
| Sparrow | Yes | Yes | Transaction context menu |
| Bitcoin Core | Yes | Yes | bumpfee RPC, or GUI Increase fee |
| BlueWallet | Yes | Yes | Transaction details, Bump fee |
| Trezor Suite | Yes | Partial | Transaction detail, Bump fee |
| Ledger Live | Yes | No | Operation details, Speed up |
| Exodus | Partial | No | Support article walkthrough |
| Exchange withdrawals | No | Receiver only | You cannot bump, the exchange holds the keys |
If your coins came from an exchange withdrawal, you cannot RBF it yourself because the exchange signed the transaction. Your options are CPFP on your receiving output once it appears, asking the exchange support to bump, or simply waiting. This is also the one honest scenario where a paid pool accelerator can make sense, because nobody in the transaction can bump the fee.
05 · The market
What paid accelerators charge against what the fix costs
We measured this instead of guessing. In the public acceleration records we sampled from the largest pool backed accelerator, the median accelerated transaction already paid 2 sat/vB, comfortably above the next block floor, and the median fee delta bought was about 2,500 sats. The median wait to confirmation after paying was around 24 minutes, roughly two and a half blocks, which is close to what those transactions would likely have seen anyway.
| Route | Typical real cost | Who can use it | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wait | 0 sats | Everyone | Correct answer whenever the rate clears the floor |
| RBF bump | A few hundred sats | Sender | Cheapest genuine fix, minutes to do |
| CPFP child | A few hundred to a few thousand sats | Receiver, or sender with change | Standard fix for exchange withdrawals |
| Free rebroadcast, this site | 0 sats | Everyone | Helps when the tx never propagated or was dropped |
| Pool accelerator | Quotes commonly 3x to 17x the real shortfall | Everyone | We watched quotes of 10,000 sats on transactions whose true deficit was under 1,800 sats |
| Fixed price accelerators | $5 to $25+ flat | Everyone | Flat pricing ignores what your transaction actually needs |
None of this means paid pool acceleration never works. The big one is backed by pools that really do mine most blocks, and paid transactions do get mined. It means the price is usually many multiples of the real shortfall, and a meaningful share of buyers pay for transactions that needed nothing. That is the part no accelerator will tell you, so we do.
We wrote the whole investigation up separately, with the lifetime records, the live quotes we pulled, and the hashrate recomputed from block data: do Bitcoin transaction accelerators actually work?
06 · Red flags
How to spot a Bitcoin accelerator scam
This corner of the internet has a scam problem, and even the legitimate operators admit it. Before you trust any acceleration site with anything, run it against this list.
Close the tab immediately. This is a theft attempt, full stop. Acceleration needs only the public transaction ID.
An anonymous prepay with no named service, no receipt trail, and no contact is the classic advance fee pattern. A real service names what it does, shows its work, and answers mail.
Nobody can promise a block. Even miners with real hashrate can only improve the odds per block found.
Success at what, exactly? A real relay report names the node, the response, and the latency, and admits it when a node is down.
If the whole network already holds your transaction, resending it changes nothing. Any site claiming otherwise is confused or counting on you being confused.
Everything StuckBTC does is checkable: your transaction is public on any explorer, and every node we push to is a public server you can query yourself.
Useful independent references: mempool.space for live mempool data, Bitcoin Optech on out of band fees for why paying miners off chain worries protocol developers, and the Bitcoin wiki on RBF.
07 · The relay set
The 20 nodes behind this accelerator
Nothing hidden. These are the public Bitcoin nodes and explorer push endpoints StuckBTC relays through. Different operators, different countries, different software stacks. When one goes stale or dies, the scope shows it flagged instead of faking a success, and we rotate it out.
| Node | Operator type | Interface |
|---|---|---|
| mempool.space | The reference open source explorer | Esplora API |
| blockstream.info | Blockstream | Esplora API |
| mempool.emzy.de | Community, Germany | Esplora API |
| mempool.ninja | Community | Esplora API |
| mempool.bitaroo.net | Bitaroo exchange, Australia | Esplora API |
| btcscan.org | Independent explorer | Esplora API |
| lohkoketju.fi | Community, Finland | Esplora API |
| bitcoin.gob.sv | Government of El Salvador | Esplora API |
| mempool.dvadsatjeden.org | Community, Slovakia | Esplora API |
| mempool.bullbitcoin.com | Bull Bitcoin exchange, Canada | Esplora API |
| mempool.bitcoin.ninja | Community | Esplora API |
| mempool.denver.space | Community, USA | Esplora API |
| mempool.elysiumno.de | Community, Germany | Esplora API |
| bitcoin.lu.ke | Community | Esplora API |
| mempool.dinerosinreglas.com | Community, Spain | Esplora API |
| mempool.nixbitcoin.org | nix-bitcoin project | Esplora API |
| blockchair.com | Blockchair explorer | Push API |
| blockcypher.com | BlockCypher | Push API |
| blockchain.com | Blockchain.com explorer | Push API |
| btc1.trezor.io | SatoshiLabs, Blockbook | Push API |
SatoshiLabs runs five of these Blockbook servers, btc1 through btc5. We use one. Counting all five would make the list look longer without adding a single independent operator, and a padded number is exactly the kind of thing this site exists to call out.
08 · Questions
Frequently asked questions
What is a Bitcoin transaction accelerator?
Is StuckBTC really free?
Why is my Bitcoin transaction stuck or unconfirmed?
How long can a Bitcoin transaction stay unconfirmed?
Does rebroadcasting actually speed up my transaction?
What is RBF and how do I use it to unstick a transaction?
What is CPFP, child pays for parent?
Should I ever pay a paid Bitcoin accelerator?
Is it safe to paste my transaction ID here?
Can you accelerate a transaction that is not in the mempool anymore?
Guides · measured, not guessed