How Long Does It Take to Unstake ETH? Exit and Entry Queue Data Since 2020

How long to unstake with Lido, Rocket Pool, Coinbase or an ETF

Liquid staking tokens and custodial platforms add their own layer on top of the protocol queue. Some are faster than a solo exit because they don’t need a validator exit for every request.

Fees and yields for these options are compared in Lido vs Rocket Pool vs Coinbase staking and the staking APR history. For which ETFs stake and how much they keep unstaked, see spot Ethereum ETFs compared.

The validator queues right now (on-chain snapshot)

We read these numbers directly from the beacon chain at slot 15,475,225 (October 20, 2026, 20:05 UTC, 4:05 PM ET), epoch 483,600.

• Exit queue: 2,717 validators doing full exits (148,541 ETH) plus 193 partial withdrawals (7,078 ETH), 155,619 ETH in all. The last one is scheduled 599 epochs ahead, about 2.7 days. validatorqueue.com showed 159,629 ETH and 3 days 21 hours including the 27-hour delay.
• Entry queue: 15,037 pending deposits worth 1,314,548 ETH for 14,432 distinct validator keys (12,755 deposits are exactly 32 ETH; others are top-ups and larger 0x02 deposits). At 256 ETH an epoch that is about 22.8 days. The oldest deposit still waiting was made on September 20, 2026.
• Consolidations: 8,448 pending consolidations. 5,160 source validators (564,730 ETH) are still on their way out, scheduled up to 1,374 epochs (about 6.1 days) ahead, which implies a consolidation churn of about 411 ETH per epoch. They use their own churn and don’t slow normal exits.
• Context: about 43.76 million ETH staked (ultrasound.money effective-balance sum) across about 818,000 validators (validatorqueue.com). The daily exit limit is about 0.13% of all staked ETH.

Ethereum entry and exit queue history, 2020–2026

The exit queue is usually close to empty and spikes on specific events; the entry queue is long when big new stakers arrive. In every 2026 reading so far, the entry queue has been longer than the exit queue.

Longest queues by year

Before the Shapella upgrade (April 12, 2023) staked ETH could not be withdrawn, so there was no exit queue to speak of. Waits are validatorqueue.com’s estimates at the time of each reading; readings before May 7, 2025 are weekly and from an older validator-count method, so treat those as approximate.

Queue peaks by month (newest first)

What drove the biggest queues

• Beacon chain launch (Dec 2020): about 626,000 ETH waited roughly three weeks to activate when churn was only 4 validators an epoch.
• Shapella (Apr 2023): withdrawals opened on April 12, 2023 and about 687,000 ETH was queued to leave in the April 17 weekly reading (approximate). Within weeks the flow reversed: the entry queue hit about 3.03 million ETH in June 2023.
• Kiln and the 2025 exit wave (Jul–Nov 2025): the exit queue climbed through July and August 2025, then jumped after September 9–10, when Kiln began exiting all its Ethereum validators as a precaution after the SwissBorg incident, adding about 1.6 million ETH. It peaked at 2.68 million ETH and a 46.6-day wait on September 12, 2025.
• The 2026 entry wave: from January 2026 the entry queue grew past 4 million ETH and 71 days (February 12, 2026) while the exit queue sat near zero, a period CoinDesk and Cointelegraph tied to strong demand to stake, especially from institutions. Total stake rose from about 36 million to 43.8 million ETH, which is also why the staking APR keeps falling.

Why there is a queue: the churn limit

Proof of stake is safer when the validator set changes slowly, so the protocol caps how much stake can join or leave per epoch. The cap has changed with upgrades (see the Ethereum upgrades timeline):

With about 43.8 million ETH staked, total stake ÷ 65,536 is about 667 ETH, so the 256 ETH cap is what binds for entries and exits today. The cap is fixed in ETH; it does not grow as more ETH is staked.

Unstaking time calculator

Enter the ETH ahead of you in the queue, or pull a live exit-queue estimate from a public beacon node, to see when a validator exit would pay out. Switch to “Staking (entry)” to see when a new deposit would start earning. To compare what you would earn once staked, use the staking comparator.

Download the data

License: our on-chain snapshot, tables, monthly and yearly aggregation and chart are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Credit “GrowYourEthereum, ETH Unstaking Queue, CC BY 4.0” with a link. The underlying queue readings come from validatorqueue.com’s historical data, MIT License, © 2025 Ether Alpha, 2023 lardon; keep that notice (it is in each CSV header) if you redistribute the readings.

GrowYourEthereum. (2026). ETH Unstaking Queue: Validator Exit and Entry Queue History [Data set]. Updated October 20, 2026. https://growyourethereum.com/data/eth-unstaking-queue. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

<a href="https://growyourethereum.com/data/eth-unstaking-queue">ETH Unstaking Queue: Validator Exit and Entry Queue History</a> by GrowYourEthereum, licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>.

@misc{growyourethereum_eth_unstaking_queue_2026,
  author       = {{GrowYourEthereum}},
  title        = {ETH Unstaking Queue: Validator Exit and Entry Queue History},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://growyourethereum.com/data/eth-unstaking-queue}},
  note         = {Data set, updated October 20, 2026. CC BY 4.0}
}

Methodology

• Snapshot (measured): standard beacon API calls to a public node at slot 15,475,225: validators with status active_exiting (minus consolidation sources), pending partial withdrawals, pending deposits, pending consolidations and the chain spec (churn constants). Exit wait = (latest scheduled exit epoch − current epoch) × 6.4 minutes; entry wait = pending deposit ETH ÷ 256 ETH per epoch.
• History: validatorqueue.com’s historical series as served on October 20, 2026 (first reading of each UTC day from May 7, 2025; weekly before), with its October 20 page reading added. Exit waits in recent readings include the 27-hour withdrawability delay. Monthly and yearly figures are the highest reading in each period.
• Sweep: validators ÷ 16 withdrawals per block × 12 seconds, which matches validatorqueue.com’s 7.1-day sweep estimate. Coinbase’s Prime help uses a more conservative “up to about 9 days”.
• Limits: queues change every epoch, so the numbers above are a dated snapshot. The live estimate in the calculator uses the newest pending partial withdrawal as a proxy for the end of the exit queue and can understate it if full exits were queued later.

ETH unstaking FAQ

Sources

• Beacon API (publicnode): pending deposits, pending partial withdrawals, pending consolidations, validators by status and spec, read Oct 20, 2026 20:05 UTC
• validatorqueue.com: live entry/exit queue, sweep delay (fetched Oct 20, 2026)
• validatorqueue.com source and historical data (MIT License)
• Ethereum consensus specs: Electra beacon chain (churn, pending deposits, partial withdrawals)
• Ethereum consensus specs: Capella beacon chain (withdrawal sweep, 16 per payload)
• EIP-7251: Increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE
• EIP-7002: Execution layer triggerable withdrawals
• EIP-7514: Add max epoch churn limit
• ethereum.org: Staking withdrawals (validator sweeping)
• Lido withdrawal queue API: request time estimate (Oct 20, 2026)
• Lido docs: Withdrawal queue
• Lido Help: How long does an Ethereum withdrawal take? (1–5 days)
• Rocket Pool API: network payload (deposit pool balance, Oct 20, 2026)
• Coinbase Help: Earn rewards with staking (ETH ~10 days estimated unstaking)
• Coinbase Help (Prime): ETH staking and unstaking timelines
• CoinDesk: Ethereum faces validator bottleneck with 2.5M ETH awaiting exit (Sept 16, 2025)
• The Block: Kiln exits Ethereum validators after SwissBorg hack (Sept 10, 2025)
• Lido research forum: Kiln precautionary exits disclosure
• Cointelegraph: entry queue above 4 million ETH, 70+ day wait (Feb 4, 2026)
• CryptoSlate: BlackRock ETHB prospectus on activation and exit queues
• ultrasound.money: effective-balance sum (staked ETH)