How do you speed up a stuck bitcoin transaction?

To speed up a stuck bitcoin transaction, you raise the fee miners earn for including it, either by replacing it with a higher-fee version or by adding a new transaction that pays for both. Which method works depends on whether you sent or received the coins and on your wallet. Paid accelerators are a third route.

Start by looking up the transaction ID in a blockchain explorer and comparing its fee rate, in satoshis per virtual byte, with what recent blocks are paying. Why low-fee transactions wait is explained in what is the Bitcoin mempool.

What is RBF in bitcoin?

Replace by fee lets an unconfirmed transaction be swapped for a new one that spends at least one of the same coins and pays more. Bitcoin Optech notes that the original BIP125 rules require the replacement to pay both a higher fee rate and a higher total fee. Wallets that support RBF usually offer a bump fee or speed up button.

Older nodes only accepted replacements if the first transaction had signalled it was replaceable. Bitcoin Core 28.0, released in October 2024, turned on full RBF by default, so any unconfirmed transaction can be replaced on nodes with that setting, and a later change removed the option to switch it off. Because the replacement spends the same coins, only whoever holds the sending keys can do it. If an exchange sent the coins, only the exchange can bump the fee, so a pending withdrawal is a matter for its support team.

What is CPFP in bitcoin?

Child pays for parent works from the other direction. You spend an output of the stuck transaction, called the parent, in a new child transaction with a high fee. Optech explains that miners using ancestor fee rate selection, as Bitcoin Core does, look at the pair together, and since the child cannot be mined without the parent, both get included.

CPFP is the main option for a receiver, because the incoming coins are an output they control. A sender can too, if the stuck transaction paid change back to them. Bitcoin Core 28.0 also added one-parent-one-child package relay, which helps such pairs travel across the network.

Does a bitcoin transaction accelerator work?

Some services take payment to prioritise a transaction. The Mempool Accelerator from mempool.space sends requests to partner mining pools, which can choose to accept them. You pay outside the blockchain, so you do not sign anything new and the transaction ID stays the same. The cost is the fee needed to reach the target rate plus a service fee, and a request cannot be changed or cancelled once made. Never share a seed phrase with any accelerator site.

What happens to an unconfirmed bitcoin transaction?

Bitcoin Core drops a transaction from its mempool after 336 hours, or 14 days, by default. An unconfirmed transaction never moves coins on the blockchain, so if it expires everywhere, the funds remain spendable by the sender. For how fees are set in the first place, see what are crypto fees.