Stuck Ethereum Transaction Checker: Why It’s Pending and How to Speed Up or Cancel It
Short answer · Updated October 21, 2026
An Ethereum transaction stays pending when its max fee is below the current base fee, when an earlier transaction from the same address (lower nonce) is still pending, or when nodes have dropped it. Paste the hash below to see which. To fix it, send a replacement with the same nonce and both the max fee and priority fee raised by at least 10% (100% for blob transactions): that is what a wallet’s Speed up or Cancel button does. Over Sep 21 – Oct 21, 2026 the base fee had a median of 0.1165 gwei and was at or below 1 gwei in 91.3% of blocks, but it peaked at 24.859 gwei, so low max fees can wait for hours.
Privacy: No wallet connection and nothing to sign. The hash goes from your browser to public Ethereum nodes (PublicNode, with dRPC and 1RPC as fallbacks) in read-only calls; we don’t receive or store it. This page never asks for a seed phrase, and no one can “unstick” a transaction for you with one.
0.1165 gwei
median base fee, Sep 21 – Oct 21, 2026
91.3%
of blocks had a base fee at or below 1 gwei
4.6 h
longest stretch above 1 gwei (from Sep 24, 2026)
12.5%
the most the base fee can rise or fall in one block
Why Ethereum transactions get stuck
Since the London upgrade (EIP-1559) every block has a base fee that every transaction in it must pay. Your transaction carries two caps: the max fee per gas, the most you will pay in total, and the max priority fee (tip) for the block builder. A block can include it only if the max fee is at least that block’s base fee; you then pay the base fee plus your tip (capped by what is left under the max fee) and the rest is never charged. When blocks are more than half full the base fee rises by up to 12.5% per block, so a max fee that looked generous a few minutes ago can fall below it. That is the most common stuck transaction, and the cure is either patience or a replacement. How the fee parts fit together is explained in Ethereum gas fees explained.
The second cause is the nonce. Each address numbers its transactions 0, 1, 2… and the network processes them strictly in order. One underpriced transaction holds up every later one from the same address, however high their fees. Third, transactions can be dropped: nodes cap their pools (geth keeps 5,120 executable transactions by default and evicts the cheapest when full, and drops nonce-gapped ones after 3 hours), so a cheap transaction can vanish from public nodes while your wallet still lists it as pending.
Cause
How the checker shows it
Fix
Max fee below the base fee
The checker shows your max fee under the next block’s base fee
Wait for the base fee to fall, or speed up with a higher max fee
An earlier nonce is stuck
Your nonce is higher than the address’s confirmed transaction count
Speed up or cancel the lowest pending nonce first; the rest follow
Tip too low in busy blocks
Max fee covers the base fee but the tip is below recent blocks’ median
Speed up with a higher priority fee (at least +10%)
Dropped by nodes
“Not found” on public nodes while your wallet still says pending
Re-send with the same nonce and a current fee, or clear wallet activity
Already replaced
Nonce lower than the confirmed count, no receipt
Nothing to do: the replacement or cancel confirmed; clear wallet activity
Wrong network or private relay
“Not found” on Ethereum mainnet
Check Base/Arbitrum/Optimism explorers, or wait for the relay to submit
How long can a low max fee wait? 30 days of real base fees
We read the base fee of all 216,000 Ethereum blocks from 26,024,875 to 26,240,874 (Sep 21 – Oct 21, 2026). For each max fee below, the table shows how often it would have covered the base fee and the longest unbroken stretch when it would not have, which is roughly the worst wait a transaction capped at that fee could have faced (ignoring the tip). The base fee ranged from 0.0202 gwei to 24.859 gwei (block 26,048,837, Sep 24, 2026, 17:35 UTC); 90% of blocks were at or below 0.8806 gwei.
Max fee
Blocks it covered
Longest stretch above
That stretch began (UTC)
0.05 gwei
6.8%
258.1 h (77,167 blocks)
2026-10-04 06:50
0.1 gwei
43%
41.2 h (12,323 blocks)
2026-09-28 07:49
0.2 gwei
67.1%
20.3 h (6,072 blocks)
2026-09-28 08:48
0.3 gwei
74.7%
17 h (5,082 blocks)
2026-09-28 11:36
0.5 gwei
83.3%
8.7 h (2,596 blocks)
2026-09-29 11:00
1 gwei
91.3%
4.6 h (1,364 blocks)
2026-09-24 14:11
2 gwei
96.9%
2.1 h (618 blocks)
2026-09-24 16:18
5 gwei
99.3%
1.2 h (371 blocks)
2026-09-24 16:40
Read it this way: a transaction capped at 0.1 gwei would have been includable in 43% of blocks, yet could have waited up to 41.2 hours; at 1 gwei the worst wait was 4.6 hours. Raising the cap costs little while fees are this low. A cancel (21,000 gas) at a 1 gwei max fee costs at most about $0.05 at $2,464.72/ETH, and you pay only the base fee plus tip, not the cap.
Time of day matters. The median base fee was lowest around 5:00 UTC (1 AM ET, 0.0707 gwei) and highest around 15:00 UTC (11 AM ET, 0.6435 gwei), when U.S. and European trading overlap. If your transaction is not urgent, a quiet hour may confirm it without a replacement. Our live gas tracker has a 56-day hour-by-weekday heatmap, and Ethereum gas price history covers the long run since 2015.
How to speed up or cancel a stuck transaction
Both work the same way: you sign a new transaction with the same nonce and higher fees. Whichever confirms first wins and the other becomes invalid, so you never pay for both. Speed up repeats the original action; Cancel replaces it with a 0 ETH transfer to yourself.
MetaMask
Close and reopen the browser (or the app) and unlock MetaMask; MetaMask suggests this first.
Open the pending transaction and choose Speed up or Cancel. In Extension v13.30+ it is in the transaction detail view (click the “Transaction submitted” toast).
If the buttons are missing, use a custom nonce: turn off Smart Transactions (Settings → Transactions), send 0 ETH to your own address, enter the stuck transaction’s nonce in “Custom nonce” and confirm. Start with the oldest pending nonce.
Ledger says Speed up and Cancel are temporarily disabled in Ledger Wallet for a display bug (support page updated May 26, 2026). Connect the same Ledger account to MetaMask or Rabby and use their buttons instead; confirm on the device. When available, Ledger only lets you speed up the lowest pending nonce, and its cancel uses a fee 30% above the original. Any wallet that lets you set a nonce and fees can do the same replacement by hand.
Client / wallet
Min. fee increase
Blob tx
Detail
Geth (go-ethereum)
10%
100%
txpool.pricebump / blobpool.pricebump defaults; both fee cap and tip must clear it
Reth
10%
100%
DEFAULT_PRICE_BUMP and REPLACE_BLOB_PRICE_BUMP in transaction-pool config
MetaMask Speed up / Cancel
Wallet sets it
n/a
Re-uses the same nonce, so gas is never paid twice
Ledger Wallet Cancel
+30% fee
n/a
Sends 0 ETH to yourself; temporarily disabled since May 2026
The 10% rule applies to both fields. In go-ethereum’s pool code a replacement is accepted only if the new fee cap and the new tip are each strictly higher than the old ones and at least old × 110 / 100. Raising only the max fee gives “replacement transaction underpriced”. The calculator above applies exactly this rule.
“I can unstick it for you” is a scam
Stuck transactions are a favorite opening for fake support agents. They find you after you post about it, then send a “wallet sync” or “rectify” link that asks for your seed phrase or a signature that hands over your tokens. Nobody but you can replace your transaction, and doing it never needs your seed phrase. See fake crypto exchange support scams, check your token approvals if you signed something, and browse Scam Watch.
How to avoid stuck transactions next time
Keep your wallet’s suggested max fee (about 2 × base fee + tip); lowering it saves nothing, because you only pay base fee + tip.
Don’t queue several transactions behind one with a custom low fee; one stuck nonce blocks the rest.
Double-check the recipient with the Ethereum address checker before sending: a confirmed transaction to the wrong address can’t be cancelled. If one already went out on the wrong network, the wrong-network finder checks 12 networks for the hash.
How the checker and the data work
The checker calls eth_getTransactionByHash and, for mined transactions, eth_getTransactionReceipt (status, gas used, effective gas price). For pending ones it compares the nonce with eth_getTransactionCount (latest and pending), and the fees with the next block’s base fee and the median tip of the last 20 blocks from eth_feeHistory. Replacement minimums follow the geth/reth rule; the suggested max fee is 2 × the next base fee + tip, a common wallet default. A public node sees only its own pending pool, so “not found” means not found there, not proof that no node has it.
The 30-day data comes from eth_feeHistory over blocks 26,024,875–26,240,874 via public RPC (1RPC, dRPC), read on October 21, 2026. Block times are interpolated from timestamps sampled every 1,800 blocks. As a check, the largest change between consecutive blocks was exactly +12.5% and −12.5%, the EIP-1559 limit, and the peak block’s base fee matched a direct block read. Dollar figures use the Coinbase ETH-USD spot price of $2,464.72 at 12:13 UTC on October 21, 2026.
Free to reuse in articles, research, reports and apps under CC BY 4.0. Copy a ready-made citation below; the HTML version includes the credit link the license asks for.
Plain text (APA style)
GrowYourEthereum. (2026). Ethereum Base Fee by Hour and Max-Fee Wait Times (30 days) [Data set]. Updated October 21, 2026. https://growyourethereum.com/tools/stuck-transaction-checker. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
HTML with credit link
<a href="https://growyourethereum.com/tools/stuck-transaction-checker">Ethereum Base Fee by Hour and Max-Fee Wait Times (30 days)</a> by GrowYourEthereum, licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>.
BibTeX
@misc{growyourethereum_ethereum_base_fee_30d_2026,
author = {{GrowYourEthereum}},
title = {Ethereum Base Fee by Hour and Max-Fee Wait Times (30 days)},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://growyourethereum.com/tools/stuck-transaction-checker}},
note = {Data set, updated October 21, 2026. CC BY 4.0}
}
Almost always one of three things: its max fee is below the current base fee, so no block can include it; an earlier transaction from the same address (a lower nonce) is still pending and blocks it; or nodes dropped it while your wallet still shows it. The checker on this page tells you which one from the transaction hash. Over Sep 21 – Oct 21, 2026 the base fee was at or below 1 gwei in 91.3% of blocks, so a max fee set during a quiet hour can sit for hours when demand spikes.
How do I speed up a pending ETH transaction?
Use your wallet’s Speed up button. It re-sends the same transaction with the same nonce and higher fees, and only one of the two can ever confirm, so you never pay gas twice. Nodes running geth or reth accept the replacement only if both the max fee and the priority fee are at least 10% higher than the original (100% for blob transactions). The calculator above gives those minimums and a fee that clears the current base fee.
How do I cancel a pending Ethereum transaction?
Send a 0 ETH transaction to your own address with the same nonce and higher fees; MetaMask and most wallets do this with a Cancel button. If the cancel confirms first, the original can never confirm. A plain transfer uses 21,000 gas, so at today’s fees a cancel costs a fraction of a cent to a few cents. You can only cancel while the transaction is still pending; a confirmed transaction is final.
How long can an Ethereum transaction stay pending?
There is no protocol time limit: a valid transaction can confirm whenever the base fee falls to its max fee. In practice nodes drop it at some point. Geth’s defaults keep at most 5,120 executable transactions in the pool and drop non-executable (nonce-gapped) ones after 3 hours, and other clients use their own limits, so a low-fee transaction can disappear from one node and stay in another. Until you replace it, assume it can still confirm.
What does “replacement transaction underpriced” mean?
Your replacement used the same nonce but did not raise the fees enough. Geth and reth require the new max fee and the new priority fee to each be at least 10% above the old ones (and strictly higher), or 100% for blob transactions. Raise both values and send again.
What is a nonce, and how does it block other transactions?
The nonce is a counter on every transaction from an address, starting at 0. Ethereum processes an address’s transactions strictly in nonce order, so if nonce 41 is stuck, nonces 42, 43 and so on wait behind it however high their fees are. Fix the lowest pending nonce first. The checker compares your transaction’s nonce with the address’s confirmed count to spot this.
My transaction says “not found”. Did I lose the ETH?
No. A transaction that is not in a block never moved anything; the ETH is still in your wallet (check the balance on a block explorer). It may have been sent on another network, dropped from mempools, or sent through a private relay. If your wallet still shows it as pending, send a new transaction with the same nonce, or clear the wallet’s activity data so it forgets the dropped one.
What max fee should I set so my transaction doesn’t get stuck?
Wallets usually set the max fee to about twice the current base fee plus the tip, which survives about six full blocks in a row (each can raise the base fee by at most 12.5%). The max fee is a cap, not the price: you pay the base fee plus your tip and the rest is never charged. Over the last 30 days a 1 gwei max fee would have been enough in 91.3% of blocks, and the longest stretch above 1 gwei was 4.6 hours.
Can I speed up or cancel from Ledger Wallet (Ledger Live)?
Ledger’s support page (updated May 26, 2026) says Speed up and Cancel are temporarily disabled in Ledger Wallet while it fixes a display issue, and suggests connecting the Ledger to MetaMask or Rabby and using their Speed up / Cancel options. When enabled, Ledger’s cancel sends 0 ETH to your own address with a network fee 30% above the original.
Someone offered to unstick my transaction. Is it safe?
No. Only you can replace your transaction, by signing a new one in your own wallet. Anyone who asks for your seed phrase, asks you to connect to a “sync”, “rectify” or “unstick” site, or contacts you first on Telegram, WhatsApp or X is running a scam. No legitimate wallet or exchange support needs your seed phrase.
Educational tool only, not financial advice. Results come from public Ethereum nodes at the moment you check and cover Ethereum mainnet only. GrowYourEthereum is not affiliated with MetaMask, Ledger, Etherscan or any node provider named here, and we never ask you to connect a wallet or sign anything.