How to decide on custom network fee?

Question

I'm slightly stuck. I hadn't bought any BTC since Oct 2023 and so didn't notice that the network fees had got so high so now I have some BTC on an exchange and I'll have to pay £20 or so to send it to one of my wallets so I've been keeping it there hoping the fees will come down.

But that got me thinking. How can I determine a decent custom network fee amount using the BTC Core wallet? Also I'm assuming that if the custom fee is too low it'll eventually just return to the source because no one will confirm it. Is that true?

I'd like to know how to determine what a reasonable network fee is.

Answer 1

how to determine what a reasonable network fee is.

By network fee we mean transaction fee.

One way to determine a reasonable transaction fee might be to look at the fees recently paid and the amount of congestion in the mempool of one or more reference nodes.

This can be presented as a list of fee rates and predicted confirmation times (or vice versa). You can then choose that rate that corresponds to an estimated confirmation time you personally feel comfortable with.

Some wallets will produce these numbers for you.

There are websites that will produce these numbers for you.