Your transaction is stuck

It has been six hours. The explorer still says unconfirmed, your balance has gone down, and the person you were paying has received nothing. Every instinct says something has broken and you should try again.

Almost nothing has broken. An unconfirmed transaction has not failed — it is a bid that has not been accepted yet, and the coins are still entirely yours. Bitcoin has no state where money is in transit and belongs to nobody.

What follows is the order to work through it: how to tell whether it is genuinely stuck, the two ways to push it through, and the one category of “help” that turns an irritating wait into a permanent loss.

A single envelope sitting alone in a wire out-tray on an empty desk, late light, nobody around to collect it.

Image to come

1Nothing is lost, and that is not reassurance

It is worth being precise about where your coins are, because the fear driving most bad decisions here is that they are somewhere in between.

They are not. Your transaction is sitting in the mempool — the waiting room every node keeps of transactions it has heard about but not yet seen mined. From there exactly two things can happen. It gets confirmed, and the payment is made. Or it is eventually forgotten, and the coins are spendable again exactly as they were before. There is no third outcome where they vanish.

2Check whether it is actually stuck

Blocks arrive about every ten minutes on average, and an average is not a schedule. Gaps of forty minutes are ordinary. Before doing anything, find out whether you are underpaying or simply impatient.

• Find the transaction ID. Your wallet lists it against the payment, often as a long string labelled txid. Copy it.
• Look it up on a block explorer or mempool visualiser. Pasting a txid reveals nothing about you — it is already public.
• Read the fee rate, not the fee. You want the figure in sats per virtual byte. The total in dollars tells you nothing about your position in the queue.
• Compare it with what is clearing now. If your rate is above the current next-block rate, you are not stuck and there is nothing to fix.
• Look at the size of the backlog. A mempool that is draining will reach you on its own. One that keeps growing will not.

If your rate sits well below what is being mined and the backlog is not shrinking, it is genuinely stuck. Everything after this point assumes that is what you found.

3If you sent it: replace it

The direct fix is to replace the transaction with an identical one paying more. Wallets label this bump fee, increase fee, or speed up. It is the same payment to the same recipient — you are not sending twice, and only one version can ever confirm.

• Bump generously, not by a hair. A replacement has to beat the original on both total fee and fee rate, and cover its own relay cost. Token increases are simply rejected, and you will have to do it again.
• Aim at the current next-block rate rather than slightly above what you first paid. You are re-entering the auction at today's prices.
• Re-verify the address on your device screen. A replacement is a new transaction requiring a new signature, so give it the same check you gave the first one.
• Expect the txid to change. The old one may linger on explorers for a while. The new one is the real payment.

One wrinkle: transactions have historically been marked as replaceable or not at the moment they were built, and older wallets that marked yours as final may refuse to bump it. Relay policy across the network has broadened considerably since, but what you can actually do is decided by your wallet's interface, not by the network. If the option is greyed out, move to the next section.

4If you are waiting to be paid: push from your end

When somebody else underpaid, you cannot replace their transaction — it is not yours to re-sign. You can bribe a miner to want it, by spending the incoming coin onward in a second transaction paying a high rate.

The child cannot be mined unless the parent is mined first, so a miner evaluating the pair takes both or neither, at their combined rate. This is child pays for parent, and it is the standard tool for an incoming payment stuck in somebody else's underpaid transaction.

• Your wallet must allow spending unconfirmed coins, and must let you choose which coin to spend. Coin control is what makes this possible.
• Send the stuck coin to another address you control, paying a deliberately high rate.
• Size the fee to carry both transactions — you are paying off the parent's shortfall as well as the child's own cost.
• If the amount is small, check the arithmetic first. Rescuing a tiny payment can cost more than the payment.

5If neither applies: wait properly

Waiting is a legitimate strategy and frequently the right one. Backlogs clear, usually faster than they feel like they will, and it costs nothing.

Demand also has rhythms — weekends and overnight hours are routinely quieter, and a transaction that looked abandoned on Friday afternoon is often mined by Sunday without anyone touching it.

If it is never mined, nodes eventually drop it, typically after about a fortnight. The coins become spendable again with no action from you, though some wallets need a restart or a rescan before they notice. Until that happens, treat the payment as still live: it can confirm at any moment if the backlog clears.

A stuck transaction is a payment waiting for a better price. It is not a payment that failed, and it is not money that went missing.

6What not to do

This is the part that matters most, because a stuck transaction produces exactly the anxious, hurried state that scams are built to catch.

• Do not send the payment again from a different wallet. Two transactions funded by different coins can both confirm, and you will have paid twice with no way to undo it.
• Never enter your recovery words into anything offering to release, unstick, or rescue a transaction. There is no such service. It is the single most reliable way to lose everything you hold, and the sites are polished and convincing.
• Treat paid accelerators with heavy suspicion. A legitimate one needs nothing but the txid. Anything asking for a seed phrase, a private key, or an upfront transfer is stealing from you.
• Do not let urgency choose the fee. Panic-bumping to many times the going rate is a permanent overpayment to fix a temporary delay.

7Making it rarer next time

Most stuck transactions are set up long before the moment of paying, and the habits that prevent them are covered properly in what a fee actually buys. In short:

• Check the going rate independently before anything large. Wallet defaults are guesses, and often stale ones.
• Send fewer, larger coins. A payment assembled from fifteen small ones is many times the size, and size is what you pay for.
• Consolidate small coins during quiet periods, weighing the privacy trade-off first.
• Do not buy speed you cannot use. If the recipient waits for several confirmations anyway, paying for the very next block buys nothing.

The short version

Look up the txid and compare your fee rate against what is clearing. If you sent it, bump the fee properly. If you are receiving it, spend it onward at a high rate. If neither is available, wait — the backlog clears, or the transaction expires and your coins come back untouched.