How much should you tip?

The base fee is not a decision. Every transaction in a block pays the same one, the protocol publishes it a block ahead, and refusing to pay it just means not transacting. The tip is the part you choose, so it is the only number worth thinking about before you hit confirm.

What a tip actually buys

Position, and only when position is scarce. Blocks have a gas target, and when they are running under it there is room for everything waiting, so a small tip gets included about as fast as a large one. Paying more in that situation buys nothing at all.

When blocks are full, the ordering matters, and the tip is the only lever that affects it. That is where a difference of a fraction of a gwei decides whether you are in this block or in one a minute from now.

Start from what recent blocks paid

The reference worth using is what other people just paid to get in. Recent blocks are public, and so are the tips inside them.

The tracker on this site reads the last few blocks and shows three of those numbers: the 25th percentile tip as cheap, the median as normal, and the 75th percentile as fast. Median rather than average, because one person overpaying during a mint drags an average far above anything you need to match.

Normal is the honest default. Reach for fast when you are competing for a specific block, and for cheap when nothing bad happens if the transaction lands in five minutes.

What overpaying costs

Multiply the extra tip by the gas your transaction uses. An extra 1 gwei on a plain ETH transfer is 21,000 gas times 1 gwei, or 0.000021 ETH. The same extra gwei on a swap that burns 150,000 gas costs about seven times that.

So the cost of being generous scales with what you are doing. On a transfer it is usually noise. On a contract call that touches a lot of storage it is worth a second look, and it is the reason a single tip setting for everything tends to be wrong in one direction or the other.

What underpaying costs

A tip below what blocks are clearing at leaves the transaction pending, and pending is not idle. Nonces are processed in order, so everything else you send from that account waits behind it. One underpriced transfer can freeze an account for as long as it sits there.

You can replace it by resending with the same nonce and a higher fee. Nodes want a meaningful increase before they accept the replacement, roughly 10%, so a token bump gets ignored.

Tipping nothing

A zero tip is legal, and when blocks are running below target a proposer loses nothing by including one, so those transactions do get in. Call it unreliable rather than impossible. Plenty of nodes and builders decline to relay or include a transaction that pays no tip, and the moment demand picks up you are last in line by construction.

Raise the tip, not the ceiling

The mistake worth avoiding is confusing the two fields. The max fee is a ceiling on base fee and tip together, and raising it does not make you more competitive, because you still pay only base fee plus your tip. Raising the tip is what changes your position.

The MetaMask guide covers where both fields live and what its labels mean, including the one that is named max base fee but is not a cap on the base fee.