What a transfer cost on the morning of November 8, 2026
How much does it cost to move USDC on Ethereum today? One reading gives a dated answer. At 08:07 UTC the eth_feeHistory call on a public Ethereum node covered the 100 blocks up to 26,368,854, and the base fee ran from 0.029 to 0.044 gwei, with 0.0432 gwei in the latest block and a median tip of 0.0091 gwei. Ether stood at $2,236.01 on Coinbase’s public spot price feed in the same minute.
Converted into dollars at the latest base fee plus the median tip, 0.0523 gwei per unit of gas, the costs look like this.
| Transfer | Gas used | Cost in ETH | Cost in USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain ETH transfer | 21,000 | 0.0000011 | $0.0025 |
| USDC, recipient already held USDC | 45,172 | 0.0000024 | $0.0053 |
| USDC, recipient held none | 62,260 | 0.0000033 | $0.0073 |
The 21,000 figure is fixed for a standard ETH transfer, according to the Ethereum gas documentation. The two USDC rows are measured, not quoted. In block 26,368,853, the USDC transfers read for this entry used 45,172 gas when the recipient already had a balance and 62,260 gas when the recipient’s USDC balance was zero before the block. In that sample, paying an address with no USDC took about 17,000 more gas.
Why the price moves
The formula on ethereum.org is gas used multiplied by the sum of the base fee and the priority fee. The protocol sets the base fee and burns it, while the priority fee is a tip for the validator, and the EIP-1559 specification describes that base fee as a network fee that moves up or down each block.
According to ethereum.org, a full block lifts the next base fee by up to 12.5%, so a busy hour compounds quickly. One gwei is a billionth of an ether.
Where it shows up for you
A wallet shows it as the network fee on the confirmation screen. An exchange folds it into the withdrawal fee.
Exchange Gemini’s transfer fee schedule says its dynamic withdrawal fees “are intended to cover network fees,” and that for ERC-20 tokens users pay gas “denominated in the crypto being withdrawn,” with Gemini covering the conversion to ETH. Merchants meet the same question when a customer pays in a stablecoin and someone has to cover the fee.
Two costly assumptions
First, that a failed transaction costs nothing. The ethereum.org page says the fee “is paid regardless of whether a transaction succeeds or fails,” and a transaction that runs out of gas midway still uses up all the gas provided.
Second, that the wallet’s suggested tip is the going rate. In the same block, one USDC sender paid an effective 2.24 gwei per unit of gas, about 43 times the base fee plus median tip measured above, and the transaction cost 0.000101 ETH, close to $0.23 at that morning’s price. Most wallets set the fee automatically, ethereum.org notes, so the line worth reading before you confirm is the fee itself.