Gas Fees: Why a £20 Transaction Can Cost You Another £20 to Send
What you're actually paying for every time a wallet asks you to approve a gas fee, and how to stop overpaying for the exact same transaction.
By Firoz Khan|8 September 2026|Updated 20 September 2026|7 min read
A gas fee isn't a platform charging you for the privilege of using it, it's a payment to the network itself for the computing resources required to process your transaction. That distinction matters, because it means the fee genuinely varies with demand rather than sitting at a fixed rate someone could simply choose to lower.
What gas actually pays for
Every transaction on a network like Ethereum requires validators to do real computational work, checking it, executing it, and permanently recording it. Gas is the price of that work, paid in the network's native coin and going to the validators securing the chain, not to any exchange or wallet provider sitting in between you and the network.
Why it spikes
Block space is limited, and when more people want to transact than there's room for in the next block, a fee auction effectively kicks in: transactions offering a higher fee get prioritised, and everyone else pays more just to compete for the same limited space. A busy NFT mint or a volatile trading session can push fees several times higher than an ordinary quiet day within minutes.
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Reading a gas fee before you confirm
A fee has two components worth understanding: the gas limit, roughly how much computational work the transaction needs, and the gas price, what you're offering to pay per unit of that work, usually shown in gwei. Most modern wallets translate this into an estimated fee in your own currency before you confirm, and it's worth actually reading that number rather than clicking through it.
How to actually pay less
Timing matters: network activity tends to dip during quieter hours, and fees dip with it. Using a layer-2 network, built specifically to process transactions cheaply before settling back to the main chain, can cut typical costs dramatically compared to transacting directly on a congested main network. Batching several actions into one transaction where a platform allows it also avoids paying the fixed overhead of gas multiple times over.
The mistake that costs people the most
Confirming a transaction during a period of high congestion without checking the fee first is the single most common way people end up paying more in gas than the trade itself is worth. If a wallet flags an unusually high estimated fee, that's worth treating as a genuine signal to wait rather than a formality to click past.
A reminder
The FCA risk warning still applies to higher-risk crypto content. Always assess how much risk you are willing to take before buying.
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