Is My Bitcoin Transaction Stuck? — TX status checker

Why is my Bitcoin transaction stuck?

You sent Bitcoin. The recipient says it hasn’t arrived. Your wallet shows it as “pending” or “unconfirmed” and nothing is happening. This is one of the most common — and most stressful — moments in self-custody, and the good news is that it’s almost always fixable, and your coins are not lost.

A Bitcoin transaction is “stuck” when it has been broadcast to the network but no miner has included it in a block yet. Miners pick transactions by fee rate — measured in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB). When the mempool (the waiting room of unconfirmed transactions) is busy, low-fee transactions wait at the back of the line. If you paid a fee that was fine yesterday but the network got busier, your transaction can sit for hours or days.

Paste your transaction ID above and this tool tells you exactly which situation you’re in.

What the verdict means

✓ Confirmed — Done. The coins have moved and the transaction is in a block. The confirmation count tells you how deep it is. Most wallets and exchanges treat 1 confirmation as settled for small amounts and wait for 3–6 for larger ones.

⏳ Pending (looking good / normal) — Unconfirmed, but your fee rate is competitive with current network demand. No action needed; it should confirm on schedule. Bitcoin blocks come roughly every 10 minutes, but the interval is random — sometimes 2 minutes, sometimes 40. A pending transaction with a healthy fee is completely normal.

🐢 Slow — Unconfirmed, and your fee is below current demand. It will likely confirm eventually, but it could take hours to a couple of days. If you can wait, just wait. If you can’t, bump the fee.

⚠️ Likely stuck — Unconfirmed, and your fee is below even the economy tier. In a busy mempool this can sit for days or get dropped from node mempools entirely. Time to take action.

How to unstick a transaction

There are two ways to speed up a stuck transaction, and which one you can use depends on whether your original transaction signaled RBF (Replace-By-Fee). The tool tells you which.

Replace-By-Fee (RBF)

If your transaction signaled RBF (most modern wallets enable this by default), you can re-broadcast the same transaction with a higher fee. The new version replaces the old one in the mempool. In your wallet this is usually a “Bump fee”, “Increase fee”, or “Boost” button on the pending transaction. Work out the new fee with our RBF fee bumper and our Fee estimator shows what rate clears the next block today.

Child-Pays-For-Parent (CPFP)

If your transaction did not signal RBF, you can’t replace it — but you can drag it forward with a second transaction. CPFP works by spending one of the stuck transaction’s outputs (typically your change output) in a new, high-fee transaction. Because a miner must confirm the parent before they can claim the child’s fee, they’re incentivized to mine both together. Many wallets have a “Speed up” option that does this for you. CPFP also works if you’re the recipient of a stuck incoming transaction — you spend the incoming (still-unconfirmed) output with a high fee to pull it through.

Or just wait

If neither RBF nor CPFP is available and the transaction isn’t urgent, waiting is a legitimate strategy. Mempools clear during quiet periods (often weekends and overnight UTC). A transaction that looks stuck on a busy Tuesday afternoon may confirm on its own by Sunday. And if a transaction is dropped from the mempool entirely — which can happen after a couple of weeks — the coins return to your wallet as spendable and you can simply send again with a proper fee.

Frequently asked questions

Is my Bitcoin lost if the transaction is stuck? No. A stuck transaction is unconfirmed, which means it either confirms later or drops out of the mempool and the coins become spendable again. Bitcoin cannot be lost to a stuck transaction — only delayed. The coins are always either at the destination (confirmed) or back in your control (dropped).

Can I cancel a stuck transaction? Sort of. If it signaled RBF, you can replace it with a new transaction that sends the coins back to yourself (an effective “cancel”), as long as it hasn’t confirmed. If it didn’t signal RBF, you can’t cancel it — you can only wait or use CPFP to push it through.

Why did my transaction confirm instantly but my friend’s took hours? Fee rate and timing. A transaction broadcast with a high fee during a quiet mempool confirms in the next block or two. The same fee during a fee spike (a popular ordinal mint, a market crash causing panic moves) might wait hours. Our Mempool page shows current congestion.

Does pasting my txid here leak anything? No. A txid is public information — it’s already on the blockchain and visible to anyone. This tool reads blockstream.info’s public API and runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere else.

Related tools

• Fee estimator — what fee rate clears the next block right now
• RBF fee bumper — calculate the replacement fee for an RBF transaction
• Mempool — live network congestion and fee tiers
• Address validator — confirm the destination address is well-formed before you send