Solo Mining in Europe: What It Really Costs

Almost every home mining guide you will read was written on American electricity rates. Run the same device on Eurostat numbers and the monthly cost roughly doubles — and varies by a factor of 3.74 between the cheapest and most expensive EU country. The odds do not change. The price of the ticket does.

This is the arithmetic redone with European figures, the vendor claims checked against them, and one error in a major EU retailer’s listings that understates running cost by nearly three times.

Key takeaways

• A Bitaxe Gamma costs about €3.03 a month at the EU average, €4.04 in Germany, €4.22 in Ireland and €1.13 in Hungary. Same device, 3.74x spread.
• The “$2 a month” figure in listings assumes US rates. At EU average it is 1.6x that, and in Germany or Ireland 2.2x.
• Taxes and levies are 28.9% of the EU household bill, €0.0837 per kWh. On a continuously running Bitaxe that is €10.49 a year in tax alone.
• Some EU listings state 4.8 TH/s at 35 W for a NerdQAxe++. That would be 7.29 J/TH, which is not achievable. Stock is about 71 W, making running cost roughly 2x what those pages calculate.
• Landed cost is not sticker price. VAT, handling and possible duty apply to hardware shipped from outside the EU.
• The heating offset is stronger in Europe in winter and worse in summer, and which one dominates depends on your latitude, not your hardware.

What a home miner actually costs, by country

All figures use the measured wall draw of a stock Bitaxe Gamma, 14.3 W, rather than the 18 W nameplate. That distinction is covered in our dashboard versus wall meter piece, and it matters more here because European rates magnify every error.

At 14.3 W continuous the device uses 10.45 kWh a month. That 14.3 W is a single published seven-day Kill-a-Watt average rather than a broad survey, so treat it as a good working figure and not a constant — your brick, your ambient temperature and your tuning will all move it. Measuring your own is the point of the closing section.

Electricity prices from Eurostat, household band DC (2,500–4,999 kWh annual consumption), all taxes and levies included, second half of 2025, published 5 May 2026.

The headline is the spread. An Irish miner pays 3.74 times what a Hungarian miner pays for exactly the same hardware doing exactly the same work. No article written for a single market can be accurate for both, which is why “it costs about $2 a month” travels badly.

Checking the vendor claims

Two claims circulate widely enough to be worth testing directly. Neither is dishonest. Both are wrong for most European readers.

”Less than $2 a month”

This appears on major listings for the Bitaxe Gamma. Reverse-engineered, it assumes roughly 18 W at about $0.15 per kWh, which is a plausible American residential rate.

In absolute terms this is small money either way, and a Gamma remains one of the cheapest things you can leave plugged in. The point is that the figure should not be carried across a currency symbol without recalculating.

The 35 W NerdQAxe++

This one is a genuine error, and it appears in the German and Spanish versions of a major European retailer’s product review: 4.8 TH/s at “under 35 W”, with a monthly cost calculated from it.

The arithmetic gives it away. 4.8 TH/s at 35 W is 7.29 J/TH. No BM1370-based board reaches that; nothing on the market does. At true stock settings a NerdQAxe++ runs about 4.8 TH/s at roughly 71 W, which is about 14.8 J/TH. The 100 W figure sometimes quoted belongs to the factory-overclocked configuration, which delivers closer to 6 TH/s.

European buyers reading that page are being shown about half the true running cost, in more than one language. If you are budgeting from a retailer’s figure, check the J/TH implied by their own numbers before you trust the euro amount at the bottom.

The tax you are paying to mine

Something that has no equivalent in most American coverage: a large and growing share of a European electricity bill is not electricity.

In the second half of 2025 the EU average household price was €0.2896 per kWh. Of that, €0.2059 was the pre-tax price and €0.0837 was taxes and levies — 28.9% of the final bill, up from 27.9% six months earlier. Eurostat notes that the small overall rise in 2025 was driven by higher taxation, not by higher energy costs.

On a Bitaxe Gamma running continuously that means roughly €10.49 a year goes to tax and levies alone. On a Hex-class device at 140 W it is over €100 a year. Worth knowing when you compare a European setup against an American one and the hardware looks identical.

The rest of the fleet, in euros

Monthly, running continuously. Only the Gamma row uses a measured wall figure; the rest are manufacturer nameplate values, which typically understate socket draw. Owner reports put the Duo nearer 27 W. Treat the last three rows as a floor rather than an estimate, and see our Duo 650 and Hex 1300 reviews for the underlying figures.

Read the bottom row across. A Hex 1300 is a €11-a-month device in Budapest and a €40-a-month device in Frankfurt. That is not a rounding difference, it is the difference between a hobby and a line item, and it should change which board you buy rather than just how you feel about the one you bought.

Landed cost is not sticker price

The second European penalty is on the hardware itself, and it is harder to quantify because it depends on route.

A board shipped from the United States arrives with shipping, import VAT at your national rate, a courier handling fee, and potentially duty depending on classification. Standard VAT runs from 19% in Germany through 21% in Spain and the Netherlands to 22% in Italy and 25% in Denmark and Sweden. Some countries apply reduced rates to domestic electricity under a consumption threshold, which is a separate matter from the VAT on the hardware itself. A €150 board can land meaningfully above €200 before anything else.

There are EU-based options that avoid this, including sellers assembling in Germany with CE-marked power supplies included, and EU-warehoused retailers shipping within the union. Prices vary and change, so the useful instruction is not a number but a method: compare landed totals, not listing prices, and check whether a power supply is included, since several EU sellers bundle a CE-certified one where US listings often do not.

If you are buying from an unfamiliar seller because the price looks good, our guide to spotting a bad clone covers what to verify first — open hardware means anyone may build one, and quality varies more than price does.

Where Europe is actually better

Two things run in the other direction, and it would be dishonest to write only the cost side.

The heating offset is worth more here. A miner converts essentially all of its electricity into heat. If you heat with electric resistive heating, that heat displaces heat you were buying anyway, and at €0.39 per kWh in Germany the displaced heat is worth a great deal more than at $0.15. In a cold-climate EU home in winter, a Bitaxe genuinely can approach free to run. Our hashrate heating page covers where the argument holds and where it breaks, and the important caveat is that it fails against a heat pump, which delivers several units of heat per unit of electricity.

Latency to European endpoints is not the constraint people think. Stratum work is small and infrequent, and the effect on a home-scale miner is negligible compared with uptime. Choose your endpoint for reliability rather than for milliseconds.

The counterweight is southern Europe in summer. Where air conditioning runs, every watt of miner heat is paid for twice: once to create it, once to remove it. At a typical air conditioner coefficient of performance around 3, that adds roughly a third to effective cost during the cooling season. In Spain, Greece or southern Italy the annual figure is not twelve identical months.

How to work out your own number

1. Find your actual rate. Not the national average — the per-kWh figure on your own bill, including all taxes and levies. Eurostat averages hide big national and tariff variation.
2. Use measured watts, not nameplate. A €20 energy-monitoring plug pays for itself in accuracy alone. Dashboard figures understate wall draw by roughly a fifth.
3. Multiply by 730.5 for a month, or 8,766 for a year. Then by your rate.
4. Add the cooling season if you have one. Roughly plus a third for the months your air conditioning runs.
5. Compare landed hardware totals, VAT and shipping included, not listing prices across borders.

The conclusion is not that European solo mining is a bad idea. It was never an income calculation anywhere, the United States included — our odds page is clear that expected value at home scale is cents per day at any latitude. What changes in Europe is the price of holding the ticket, and it is worth knowing that price honestly before you buy rather than three months into the bill.

At the EU average, a Bitaxe Gamma is a €36-a-year lottery ticket that also teaches you how Bitcoin works and puts a small piece of hashrate outside the big pools. Whether that is worth €36 is a question only you can answer, but at least now it is the right question with the right number attached.