Seven years of electricity for one Antminer S23 Hyd costs $12,298.58. The machine itself costs $12,299.00. Power is not a line item in mining – it is the other half of the purchase.
Ask a mining host what they charge and you will usually get a range, a “contact us”, or one headline cent-figure with no explanation of who actually pays it. That vagueness is not an accident: the price of power is the single input in hosted mining that decides the outcome, and most operators would rather you compared brand promises than arithmetic. This article does the opposite. Here is the whole table, the tier rules behind it, and the formula that generates it.
Start with the number that reframes the question. An Antminer S23 Hyd draws 5,510 W. Running flat out, that is 132.24 kWh a day and 337,873 kWh over seven years. At the cheapest rate OneMiners publishes – $0.0364 per kWh in Nigeria, on a seven-year prepaid block – seven years of power costs $12,298.58. The same machine, live in the catalog today, costs $12,299.00. To within forty-two cents, running the hardware is exactly as expensive as buying it.
Key takeaways (September 2026)
● The same kilowatt carries four published prices at every site: premium, online-ordered, external and prepaid. Which one you pay depends on how the machine arrived, not on how well you negotiate.
● Prepaid energy is a formula, not a haggle: 4 percent off that site’s online-ordered rate at 1 year, 12 percent at 3, 30 percent at 7. Nigeria: $0.052 x 0.70 = $0.0364/kWh.
● At the September 6, 2026 hashprice of $39.63 per PH/s per day (Hashrate Index), one Antminer S23 Hyd grosses about $22.99 a day before power.
● The rate decides between 21 and 69 percent of that revenue. Same machine, same hashprice: about $18.18 a day net at our Nigeria prepaid rate, about $7.12 a day at a typical US home rate.
● The spread between our cheapest and dearest published rate is $0.0681/kWh – about $3,287 a year on one machine.
The number that reframes the question
Most people shopping for a site sort providers by the headline rate and stop there. That is the wrong shape of question, because on modern hydro miners the power bill is not a running cost underneath the purchase – it is a second purchase of roughly the same size, paid in instalments. An S23 Hyd at 9.5 J/TH is about as efficient as retail hardware gets, and it still burns its own sticker price in power inside seven years. Less efficient units burn theirs faster.
That symmetry is why the tier you land in is not a detail. Across the table below, the spread between our cheapest rate and our dearest is $0.0681 per kWh – $3,287 a year on one S23 Hyd running around the clock. Nobody ignores a three-thousand-dollar annual swing when choosing a machine. Many ignore it when choosing a rate.
One kilowatt, four prices: how a hosting rate is actually built
Every site quotes four different prices for the same electricity, and which one applies to you depends on the route the hardware took to the rack. That structure is almost always left implicit in this industry – and an implicit rule can be reinterpreted after you have shipped.
● Premium – the all-in managed rate for a unit bought from us and hosted with us. Nigeria: $0.0480/kWh. The lowest standard rate at every site, because the machine is a known quantity from day one.
● Online-ordered – the standard rate for hardware ordered through the store outside the premium arrangement. Nigeria: $0.0520/kWh. This is the figure the location cards display, which is why our own homepage looks dearer than our best price.
● External – the rate for a unit you bought elsewhere and shipped in. Nigeria: $0.0572/kWh. Intake, bench testing and warranty exposure on hardware we did not supply are real costs, and they live here rather than in a later fee.
● Prepaid energy – you buy a block of power up front for a fixed term and the rate is cut by a published formula. Nigeria at seven years: $0.0364/kWh, fixed.
The prepaid tier is worth reading twice, because it is arithmetic rather than a negotiation. One year takes 4 percent off that site’s online-ordered rate, three years takes 12 percent, seven years takes 30 percent. Nigeria’s $0.052 online rate multiplied by 0.70 gives exactly $0.0364, and the same operation reproduces the prepaid column across the table below – in seven rows the published price is then rounded down to three decimals, always in the customer’s favour. You can rebuild our whole discount schedule on a pocket calculator, which is the test a real rate card should survive and a vague one is designed to avoid.
The tiers also explain a gap people usually blame on geography. At Nigeria alone, external to the seven-year prepaid rate is $0.0208 per kWh – roughly $1,004 a year on a single S23 Hyd. Same building, same grid, same cooling loop. The whole difference is how the unit arrived and how far ahead you paid.
The published rate card, site by site
Below is the full card as published on the individual location pages, read one by one on September 10, 2026. Sixteen pages are live: fifteen physical sites plus a US-wide no-service-fee option that spans the existing American facilities rather than adding a new one. We quote capacity per site rather than a network total, because folding that aggregate into a fleet figure double-counts real megawatts. Nigeria is 33 MW with 150 MW under construction, China 288 MW, South Carolina 68 MW, Texas 65 MW, Ethiopia 40 MW on hydro.
Two rows are easy to misread. The cheapest column is not a teaser confined to one site: the seven-year price is available everywhere, which is why Kansas at $0.0455 beats Nigeria’s own premium rate. And Finland shows an identical premium and online-ordered rate, the only row where the usual tier ordering does not hold – we have flagged it internally rather than leave an anomaly in a table we are asking you to check.
OneMiners published electricity rates – all 15 sites (read September 10, 2026)
What the rate does to one real machine
Now the arithmetic, with live inputs. Bitcoin hashprice – the industry’s revenue-per-hashrate benchmark – stood at $39.63 per PH/s per day on September 6, 2026 per Hashrate Index, after difficulty rose 1.31 percent to 127.45T while network hashrate stalled near 934 EH/s. Our S23 Hyd is 0.58 PH/s, so gross revenue is 39.63 multiplied by 0.58: about $22.99 a day before power. That is a measurement, not a guarantee – it drifts with the BTC price (about $77,556 on September 11) and with every difficulty adjustment.
Against that revenue there is one meaningful cost, because we take 0 percent of mined coins – you keep every satoshi and pay for power. At 132.24 kWh a day, the same hardware lands in five very different places:
● Nigeria, seven-year prepaid at $0.0364/kWh – $4.81 a day of power. Net about $18.18 a day, power at 21 percent of revenue.
● Kansas USA, seven-year prepaid at $0.0455/kWh – $6.02 a day. Net $16.97, power at 26 percent.
● Nigeria, premium at $0.0480/kWh – $6.35 a day. Net $16.64, power at 28 percent.
● Czechia, external at $0.1045/kWh – $13.82 a day. Net $9.17, power at 60 percent.
● Typical US home rate at $0.1200/kWh – $15.87 a day. Net about $7.12, power at 69 percent.
Read the strongest result against the weakest. With the same Antminer S23 Hydro and the same September 2026 hashprice, a seven-year prepaid contract in Nigeria generates approximately $18.18 net per day, or $6,636 per year. The same machine running at a typical U.S. residential electricity rate produces only $7.12 per day, or about $2,599 annually.
The other scenarios fall between those extremes: seven-year prepaid hosting in Kansas returns $16.97 per day, Nigeria’s premium rate returns $16.64, and Czechia’s external rate returns $9.17.
That leaves a $4,037 annual difference between the best hosting rate and typical at-home mining. The hardware is identical; the electricity contract creates the gap. This is why experienced operators focus on hosting economics rather than simply buying a miner and plugging it in at home.
Payback, and the input most calculators leave floating
Payback is the machine price divided by daily net, holding today’s hashprice flat – which it will not be, so treat these as a snapshot rather than a forecast. At the Nigeria prepaid rate, $12,299 divided by $18.18 is about 677 days, roughly 22 months. At the Nigeria premium rate, about 24 months. At a Czech external rate, about 44 months. At a US home rate, roughly 57 months.
Here is what most online tools quietly fumble: they let you type one power price and project it forward for half a decade as though the grid were a constant. Prepaid energy is the only version of that assumption anyone can be held to. On the S23 Hyd, Nigeria’s seven-year block costs $12,298.58 against $17,569.41 at the standard online rate – about $5,271 fixed per machine, before you take any view on what power costs in 2033. Buy Now, Pay Later works the other way on the hardware half, opening the same scenario at 25 percent down, roughly $3,075 up front.
How to price-check any host in ten minutes
Run this on us, then on everyone else. A rate card that cannot survive five questions is not a price, it is a pitch with a number attached.
● Is there a per-site rate table, or one company-wide “from” figure? A single number spanning continents means the real price gets set after you commit.
● Is the long-term discount a published rule or a conversation? A percentage you can apply yourself is checkable; “contact sales” is not.
● What share of mined coins does the host take? Ours is zero. Any percentage of output is a second, floating price you cannot model.
● Is the rate fixed, and for how long? An unfixed rate turns every payback estimate into fiction the moment the grid moves.
● What is the uptime commitment, in writing? A cheap kilowatt on a site down 10 percent of the year is not cheap. Ours is a 95 percent SLA against 98 percent-plus observed.
This is the whole basis on which we claim the number-one rated Tier-1 position rather than simply the largest. Every line above is answerable with a link and a number: a real machine from the catalog, a published rate at a named site, a seven-year hardware warranty, a live dashboard showing per-unit uptime, and a discount schedule you can reproduce on a phone. Nothing is taken on faith.
The verdict
If you take one thing from this page, make it the opening arithmetic. Over a seven-year life the power behind a flagship hydro unit costs about what the unit costs – so every hour spent comparing hashrate specs while treating the rate as a footnote is an hour spent optimising half the problem. Two buyers can take the identical S23 Hyd on the same day and finish four thousand dollars a year apart on the column they landed in.
So the honest answer to what it costs to mine Bitcoin in 2026 is that it turns almost entirely on one number – and you are entitled to see that number before you buy anything. Ours is above in full, with the formula behind it and one anomaly we have not airbrushed out. An operator who will not show you the table is telling you something about the table.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to host a Bitcoin miner in 2026?
You pay for power and nothing out of the coins you mine. On an Antminer S23 Hyd drawing 132.24 kWh a day, that is about $4.81 a day at our Nigeria seven-year prepaid rate and $13.82 at the dearest published external rate.
What is the cheapest electricity rate for Bitcoin mining hosting?
Our lowest published rate is $0.0364 per kWh in Nigeria on a seven-year prepaid block, against $0.0480 premium at the same site. Every site has a prepaid price, and Kansas at $0.0455 sits below Nigeria’s premium rate – the cheapest option is not always the cheapest country.
What is prepaid energy and is it worth it?
You buy a fixed block of power up front and the rate is cut by a published formula: 4 percent at one year, 12 percent at three, 30 percent at seven. On one S23 Hyd the seven-year block costs $12,298.58 instead of $17,569.41. Whether that is worth it depends on your view of power prices over seven years – which is the point, since it turns an unknown into a fixed number.
Why does the same site charge different rates to different customers?
Because the hardware arrives by different routes. A unit bought from us is a known quantity and gets the premium rate; one shipped in carries intake, testing and warranty exposure we did not control, so it sits at the external rate.
Is hosted mining cheaper than mining at home?
On the numbers above, substantially. At a typical US residential rate of $0.12 per kWh, power takes 69 percent of an S23 Hyd’s revenue and payback stretches past four and a half years. At our Nigeria prepaid rate it takes 21 percent and payback lands near 22 months.
See every site’s published rate, pick your tier, and run your own machine through the numbers before you commit a dollar.
Informational only, not financial advice. Rates reflect the location pages as published on September 10, 2026 and are subject to change; hashprice, BTC price and difficulty move daily, so all net and payback figures are estimates at a flat hashprice, not projections. Mining involves risk.
