# GWEI

> A live Ethereum gas tracker: the current base fee and priority fee, what to set for a fast, normal, or cheap transaction, and what that costs in dollars.

## When to use GWEI

Use GWEI when you need the current Ethereum mainnet gas price: what to set for a fast, normal, or cheap transaction, what a transfer, swap, mint, or contract deploy costs in dollars right now, or how the base fee and priority fee work. The tracker at https://gwei.ryanio.com renders the current reading into the page HTML, so the numbers are readable without running JavaScript, and https://gwei.ryanio.com/api/gas returns the same numbers as JSON. A reading is never more than 30 seconds old, and comes from the chain directly rather than from a third-party gas oracle.

Do not use GWEI for gas prices on any chain other than Ethereum mainnet, for a guaranteed quote (fees move every block, so a number read a minute ago may already be stale), or for anything beyond the current reading, the last 24 hours of history, and the guides below on how fees work.

## API

- [Current gas price (JSON)](https://gwei.ryanio.com/api/gas): fast, normal, and cheap priority fees, the base fee, the wallet-ready max fee, and the USD cost of a transfer.
- [24-hour fee history (JSON)](https://gwei.ryanio.com/api/gas/history): base fee and tip readings over the last day.
- [OpenAPI description](https://gwei.ryanio.com/openapi.json)

Every page on this site also serves a Markdown rendering of itself to a request whose Accept header includes text/markdown. Those Markdown responses carry a Vary: Accept header; the HTML ones do not.

## Main pages

- [Gas tracker](https://gwei.ryanio.com/): current fast/normal/cheap priority fees, base fee, wallet-ready max fee, USD cost by transaction type, and fee history.
- [Guides](https://gwei.ryanio.com/learn): index of the guides below.
- [About](https://gwei.ryanio.com/about): what GWEI is, where the data comes from, who built it.
- [Contact](https://gwei.ryanio.com/contact): how to reach the author.

## Guides

- [What is Ethereum gas?](https://gwei.ryanio.com/learn/what-is-gas): What you are paying for when a transaction costs money.
  - Q: What is Ethereum gas?
  - A: Gas is the unit that measures how much work an Ethereum transaction does. Adding two numbers costs a few units and writing to storage costs thousands, and the fee you pay is the gas your transaction consumed multiplied by the price you agreed to pay per unit.
  - Updated: 2026-08-11

- [What is gwei?](https://gwei.ryanio.com/learn/what-is-gwei): The unit gas prices are quoted in, and how it relates to ETH.
  - Q: What is gwei?
  - A: A gwei is one billionth of an ether, or 0.000000001 ETH. Gas prices are quoted in gwei because the numbers are unreadable written out in whole ether, and the name is short for gigawei.
  - Updated: 2026-08-11

- [Why gas prices change](https://gwei.ryanio.com/learn/why-gas-changes): Block space is limited, so the price of it moves with demand.
  - Q: Why do Ethereum gas prices change?
  - A: Each block holds a limited amount of gas and has a target set at half that limit. After every block the protocol compares the gas actually used against the target and moves the base fee up or down for the next block, by at most 12.5%, so the price tracks demand for block space.
  - Updated: 2026-08-03

- [EIP-1559 explained](https://gwei.ryanio.com/learn/eip-1559): Base fee, priority fee, max fee, and which part gets burned.
  - Q: What is EIP-1559?
  - A: EIP-1559 is the fee market Ethereum has used since the London upgrade. Every transaction pays a base fee that the protocol sets and burns, plus a priority fee that goes to the block proposer, and the max fee is the ceiling you set on the two together.
  - Updated: 2026-08-11

- [How much should you tip?](https://gwei.ryanio.com/learn/how-much-to-tip): Picking a priority fee, and what it costs to get it wrong.
  - Q: How much should you tip on an Ethereum transaction?
  - A: The base fee is charged to everyone in the block, so the priority fee is the only number you actually choose. Match it to what recent blocks paid rather than picking a round figure, because overpaying buys position you rarely need and underpaying leaves the transaction pending.
  - Updated: 2026-08-11

- [How to set gas in MetaMask](https://gwei.ryanio.com/learn/how-to-set-gas): Where the custom fee fields are and what each one does.
  - Q: How do you set gas fees in MetaMask?
  - A: On the confirmation screen, open the network fee row and choose Advanced to get the editable fields instead of the presets. Set the priority fee to match what recent blocks paid, set the max base fee above the current base fee with room to spare, and leave the gas limit alone.
  - Updated: 2026-08-11

- [Best time to transact](https://gwei.ryanio.com/learn/best-time-to-transact): Whether waiting for cheap gas is worth it, and how to wait.
  - Q: When is the best time to send an Ethereum transaction?
  - A: Activity thins out during the small hours UTC and over weekends, so fees are usually lowest then. The pattern is real but weaker than most advice implies, and event-driven spikes move the price far more than the hour of the day does.
  - Updated: 2026-08-03

## Optional

- [Sitemap](https://gwei.ryanio.com/sitemap.xml): every indexable URL, with the date each last changed.
- [robots.txt](https://gwei.ryanio.com/robots.txt)