Honest answer
Is mining Monero worth it in 2026?
Updated 13 September 2026 · gross figures, measured · XMR · RandomX
Short version: it depends almost entirely on what you are mining with, and for most laptops the honest answer is no. Monero's proof-of-work, RandomX, is deliberately CPU-friendly — that is what makes it approachable, and also what caps it. A CPU is a CPU. Below is what ordinary machines actually produce, so you can decide before you install anything.
What a CPU actually earns
Hashrates below come from validated community submissions to the official XMRig benchmark database, with our own measured M4 Max run included. Earnings use the live coin rate.
| Chip | ≈ RandomX hashrate | ≈ gross / day | ≈ gross / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple M1 | 2.3 kH/s | $0.09 | $2.70 |
| Apple M2 Pro | 4.1 – 4.6 kH/s | $0.17 | $5.20 |
| Apple M3 Max | 7.1 kH/s | $0.28 | $8.50 |
| Apple M4 Max | 7.0 – 7.2 kH/s | $0.28 | $8.50 |
So a fast laptop grosses somewhere around eight and a half dollars a month. That is the ceiling for most people, not the floor. If your electricity is expensive, that number does not survive contact with your bill — and we would rather say so here than after you have installed something.
When it is worth it
There are three cases where the answer turns positive, and they are worth being precise about.
1. The machine is already on and already paid for. A desktop that runs anyway, on a tariff you are not choosing at the margin, converts idle cycles you were spending regardless. The marginal question is the only honest one: not "does mining pay", but "does mining pay more than the extra power it draws on your tariff".
2. You want the coin itself, not the dollars. Monero is genuinely private and genuinely fungible, and mining is the one way to acquire it without an exchange account, a KYC form, or anyone recording that you hold it. Some people value that well above $8.50 a month. That is a legitimate reason and it does not need to be justified as an investment.
3. You have a graphics card. This is the big one, and it changes the arithmetic by an order of magnitude — but it means mining something other than Monero. A GPU cannot mine XMR competitively; RandomX is built to resist exactly that. An idle RTX 4070 SUPER grosses about $72 a month on Pearl, against about $8.50 for the fastest laptop CPU on Monero. If you own a gaming PC, the CPU is not the interesting part of it. Our measured per-card figures have the full table.
When it is not
If you are on a laptop, on battery, on an expensive tariff, or hoping to fund anything — no. It will not get there, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. A fan running at full tilt for a few dollars a month is a bad trade, and thermal wear on a machine you depend on is a real cost that does not show up in any calculator.
We build a miner and we still think you should not run it on a MacBook on battery. Pasiv pauses itself on battery by default for that reason.
How to check honestly, in about a minute
Pasiv shows your machine's real measured hashrate and a live gross estimate within a minute of starting — your actual chip, your actual thread count, today's actual price and difficulty. That is a better answer than any table, including this one. It is free, it is open core so the fee maths is readable, and the pool pays your own wallet directly — there is no account and nothing of yours to hold.
Start it, read the number, and stop it if the number is not worth it. That is the whole test.
Frequently asked questions
Can I mine Monero on a GPU instead?
Not competitively, and that is by design. RandomX is deliberately built so that general-purpose CPUs stay viable and specialised hardware gains little — it is what keeps Monero mining widely distributed. If you have a capable NVIDIA card, the useful move is to mine a GPU coin with it, such as Pearl, and leave Monero to the CPU.
How much Monero can I mine in a day?
At the hashrates above, a fast laptop CPU produces a small fraction of an XMR per day — in dollar terms roughly twenty-eight cents gross. Pools pay out once you cross their minimum, so a slow machine accumulates for a while before the first payment lands. Pasiv shows both the estimate and your pool's progress toward its threshold.
Is it still worth mining Monero on an old PC?
Older CPUs earn proportionally less, and the power draw does not fall as fast as the hashrate does, so an old desktop is usually the worst case on both sides of the ledger. The exception is a machine already running continuously for another reason, such as a home server — see homelab mining.
Does Pasiv take a cut?
4% on Monero, taken as time-sliced mining and only while you are actively mining — paused or idle costs nothing. It is a compile-time constant you can read in the open core, and it is logged in the app beside the published fee address so you can verify it on the pool. Every other coin Pasiv mines is fee-free today. Your pool's own fee, typically around 1%, is separate and never reaches us.
Do I need an account or a wallet from you?
No. You paste your own XMR address and the pool pays it directly. Pasiv is non-custodial — it has no wallet, never holds coins, and never asks for a private key. There is no sign-up.
Non-custodial · no account · stop any time