Bitcoin Mining at Home in Germany and Switzerland: Is It Worth It?

Short answer: Bitcoin mining at home almost never pays off in Germany or Switzerland. A current machine with 200 TH/s earns about €6 a day but uses €31 of electricity (Germany) or CHF 23 (Switzerland). Only below about 7 cents per kWh does the revenue cover the electricity, not counting the machine. Exceptions are rare: surplus solar power, or waste heat you would otherwise produce electrically.

You have bitcoin, a basement and perhaps solar panels on the roof. So it's tempting to make the coins yourself instead of buying them. Mining bitcoin at home sounds like independence and like bitcoin at cost price. This article calculates it with real figures from Nov 13, 2026: for German and Swiss household electricity, for surplus solar power, for heating with waste heat and for small hobby devices.

What you need for bitcoin mining at home

You haven't been able to mine bitcoin sensibly with a PC or a graphics card since 2013. Today only ASICs pay their way: devices that can do nothing but compute SHA-256 hashes. How mining works in principle and why it protects the network is explained in the overview Bitcoin mining explained.

To run one at home you need four things:

1. An ASIC machine. A current professional machine manages about 200 TH/s, that is 200 trillion attempts per second, and uses about 3.5 kW to do it. It costs several thousand euros.
2. A suitable power connection. 3.5 kW of continuous load is more than a normal socket can handle (details below).
3. A pool. On your own you will practically never find a block. In a pool you get your share of the blocks found by all participants, minus a fee of usually 1 to 4%.
4. A bitcoin address. The pool pays out to it. Ideally this is a wallet whose keys only you hold, as described in the custody guide.

What a miner earns today

Your revenue depends on three numbers: your share of the whole network's computing power, the reward per block and the bitcoin price. On Nov 13, 2026, mempool.space estimated the network hashrate at about 930 EH/s. Averaged over the last 144 blocks, a block paid 3.149 BTC: 3.125 BTC of new bitcoin and 0.024 BTC in fees.

A machine with 200 TH/s therefore has about 0.00002% of the computing power. After a 2% pool fee, that comes to about 9’560 satoshis a day, or €5.95 or CHF 5.50 at the price of €62’266 or CHF 57’484.

These €5.95 are not a fixed wage. They fall with every difficulty increase, because your share of the network gets smaller, and they halve with the next halving at block 1’050’000, roughly in spring 2028. How the difficulty readjusts every two weeks is in the article Difficulty adjustment.

Bitcoin mining at home with household electricity: the numbers for Germany and Switzerland

Electricity decides everything. Professional miners often pay 3 to 6 cents per kWh, because they sit right next to power plants or in countries with cheap electricity. Households pay many times that:

And that doesn't even include the machine itself. The Swiss median for 2027 of 26.5 Rappen changes little either: the loss falls by about one franc a day.

Even the cheapest municipal tariff in Switzerland for 2027, 10.56 Rappen according to ElCom, is still above the break-even. In Germany, new customers on cheap tariffs pay around 24 cents, still more than three times as much.

Does a rising price help?

Less than you might think. If the price rises, your revenue in euros rises, but more miners also plug in new machines and the difficulty follows. Still, take the most favourable case: the price jumps immediately to the long-term Power Law trend of about €98’200 (CHF 90’660), 1.6 times today's, and the hashrate stays the same.

Then each kWh earns about 11 cents or 10 Rappen. That is still less than household electricity in both countries. And the 2028 halving halves the revenue again at the latest. How we calculate trend and floor is in the methodology; the model is not a guarantee.

Mining with solar power: does the surplus pay off?

If you have solar panels, you think of the surplus that goes into the grid at midday. That electricity isn't free: you give up the feed-in tariff. For new systems up to 10 kWp with self-consumption, Germany's EEG (Renewable Energy Sources Act) has paid 7.70 cents per kWh since Aug 1, 2026. In Switzerland, since 2026 systems under 30 kW get a minimum tariff of 6 Rappen; many utilities pay more.

In the best case, half a Rappen per kWh remains. On top of that come three practical problems:

• The surplus is too small. A 200 TH/s machine needs 3.5 kW without interruption. A typical rooftop system delivers that only on sunny summer middays, and then only partly.
• The machine sits idle most of the time. If it runs only 1’000 full-load hours a year, it earns about €250 or CHF 230. You won't pay off a machine costing several thousand euros that way before the halving halves the revenue.
• Using it yourself is worth more. Every kWh of solar power used by your household, an electric car or a heat pump saves you the full electricity price of 26 to 37 cents. Mining earns 7.

It only gets more interesting for older systems whose feed-in tariff has expired after 20 years, and in hours with negative electricity prices. Even then, the question remains whether the machine pays for itself in those few hours.

Heating with a miner: what the waste heat is worth

A miner turns almost all of its electricity into heat. 84 kWh of electricity become 84 kWh of heat, as much as from a fan heater of the same power. That's why smaller devices are sold as heaters. The question is what you would otherwise use to make the heat.

So the miner is an electric heater with about a 20% discount. If you heat electrically today, say with night storage heaters or a fan heater in your hobby room, you save a little. Against a heat pump it clearly loses, and district heating or gas are usually cheaper too.

Hobby devices and solo mining

Small open-source miners like the Bitaxe manage about 1.2 TH/s at 15 W. In a pool, such a device earns about 57 satoshis a day, a good €13 a year. The electricity costs about €49 a year in Germany. As a source of income it's useless; as a learning tool it's great: you see how mining works technically, and you support the network's decentralisation a tiny bit.

Many people use such devices for solo mining. Then you get either the whole block, currently more than 3.1 BTC, or nothing. The chance with 1.2 TH/s is about 1 in 15’000 per year. How the chance changes with your device is shown in the solo mining calculator.

Power, noise and rented flats: the practical hurdles

Even if the numbers worked, mining at home often fails in everyday life:

• Socket: a German Schuko socket is rated for 16 A, so at most 3.7 kW, but not for hours of full load. That's why emergency charging cables for electric cars limit themselves to about 2.3 kW. A normal Swiss socket (type 13) is rated for only 10 A, about 2.3 kW. For a 3.5 kW machine you need a dedicated circuit installed by an electrician.
• Noise: professional air-cooled machines are as loud as a vacuum cleaner, around the clock. In a living space that's unbearable, and in a rented flat for the neighbours too. Water or immersion cooling is quieter, but more expensive.
• Heat in summer: 3.5 kW of waste heat quickly heats a basement room to over 40 degrees. In summer you have to get rid of the heat instead of using it.
• Insurance and tenancy agreement: a device under continuous load can matter for your contents or building insurance and for your landlord. Clarify this beforehand.

Taxes on mining income in Germany and Switzerland

Bitcoin mining is legal in both countries. But the bitcoin you mine are income, from the very moment they reach you.

Germany: according to the BMF (Federal Ministry of Finance) letter of Mar 6, 2025, mining income is, depending on scale, business income (§ 15 EStG) or other income (§ 22 No. 3 EStG). For other income there is an exemption limit of €256 a year. If you mine at a loss for a long time, expect the tax office to see no intention to make a profit and not to recognise the losses. Everything else is in the guide Bitcoin taxes in Germany.

Switzerland: the ESTV (Federal Tax Administration) and the cantons treat mining income as income, depending on scale from self-employment. It is valued at the price in francs when received. After that, the bitcoin go into the securities list (Wertschriftenverzeichnis) like all others and are subject to wealth tax.

This information is for orientation and does not replace advice. If you mine at real scale, a tax professional can help.

The alternative: buying instead of mining

The simplest comparison: what if you put the electricity money straight into bitcoin? For one day's €31.08 of electricity you get about 49’900 satoshis in Germany; in Switzerland, for CHF 23.27, about 40’500. The machine finds about 9’560 in the same day. So buying gets you four to five times as many sats, and you save yourself the machine, the noise, the electrician and the business tax return.

Where the price stands relative to its long-term trend is shown by the Power Law analysis. On Nov 13, 2026, bitcoin was at 0.63 times the trend, in the Accumulation zone and about 3% above the floor of €60’578 (CHF 55’926). How to buy regularly and which providers exist is compared in the article Bitcoin savings plans: providers compared. Work out your savings plan: savings plan calculator.

Calculate your own machine

Enter your device, your electricity price and the period. The calculator takes the network's current hashrate, includes the next halving and shows whether simply buying would have brought more bitcoin:

Who bitcoin mining at home can pay off for

Honestly, very few people. It can work when several things come together:

• You have electricity for well under 7 cents per kWh, for example from your own hydro, biogas or old solar system without a feed-in tariff.
• You heat electrically anyway and can use all the waste heat.
• You have a room where noise and heat bother no one, and a suitable power connection.
• You want to understand mining and accept the costs as the price of learning.

For everyone else, mining at home is an expensive hobby. The network doesn't need you as a miner either: it is protected by about 930 EH/s whether you join in or not. More on energy, nodes and technology is in the Mining & technology category.