Withdrawal fee

The exchange pays a miner fee to move coins; you pay whatever the exchange decided to print on the screen. Binance charges a flat 0.0002 BTC to withdraw over the bitcoin network, which is 20,000 satoshis, against a typical single-input spend of roughly 141 virtual bytes that costs a few hundred satoshis when the mempool is quiet. That gap is one reason people leave coins where they bought them.

How it works

Withdrawal pricing follows one of two models, and knowing which one your exchange uses changes when you should press the button.

The flat model charges a fixed amount per withdrawal regardless of size or congestion. Binance's bitcoin withdrawal fee sits at 0.0002 BTC with a minimum withdrawal of 0.0004 BTC, so the fee is a fixed 50 percent of the smallest permitted transfer and a rounding error on a large one. The pass-through model, used by Kraken and Coinbase among others, quotes an estimate of the current on-chain cost, which rises when the mempool is busy and falls when it is not.

Neither model reflects what the exchange actually spends. Large platforms batch dozens or hundreds of customer withdrawals into a single transaction with one set of inputs and many outputs, so the marginal on-chain cost of adding your payout is roughly the 31 virtual bytes of one extra output. A flat fee collected from every customer in that batch is revenue, not cost recovery.

Lightning changes the arithmetic entirely. Binance's Lightning withdrawal minimum is 0.00002 BTC and routing costs are typically a satoshi or two, while Kraken and Strike also support Lightning payouts. If you are moving small amounts often, the network you choose matters more than the exchange you chose.

Where you see it

The withdrawal screen is the only place a withdrawal fee appears, and it appears after you have already bought.

It also has a fiat twin. Bitstamp charges a small fixed fee on SEPA withdrawals, international wires cost more, and card payouts carry processing charges, so getting money out has a price in both directions. Luno's European customers found the hardest version of this during its EU wind-down: crypto withdrawals to self-custody were switched off entirely, leaving selling as the only exit.

The cost that catches people is frequency, not size. Withdraw a 50 dollar weekly purchase every week at a flat 20,000 satoshi fee and you pay 1,040,000 satoshis over a year, 0.0104 BTC, to move 2,600 dollars of buying. Withdraw once a quarter instead and you pay it four times. This is why bitcoin-only brokers such as River and Swan offer threshold-based automatic withdrawals rather than per-purchase ones: the sensible cadence is driven by the fee, not by the schedule you buy on.

Withdrawal fee vs transaction fee

A transaction fee is paid to whoever mines your transaction and is set by the fee market in satoshis per virtual byte. A withdrawal fee is paid to the exchange and is set by its pricing team. They can be the same number when a platform passes the cost through honestly, and they are wildly different when a platform charges a flat rate through a batched transaction. The tell is whether the quoted figure moves with congestion: a fee that is identical on a calm Sunday and a frantic Tuesday is not a network fee.