Why Your Transaction Is Stuck and the Three Ways to Unstick It

A transaction sitting as pending has been broadcast to the network but not included in a block. In the overwhelming majority of cases the reason is that the fee offered is below what blocks are currently clearing.

Diagnose first

Open the transaction on a block explorer using its hash.

Check the gas price you offered against the current base fee. If yours is lower, that is the answer and no further investigation is needed.

Check whether you have an earlier pending transaction. Transactions from an address execute in strict order by nonce. If transaction number 42 is stuck, transactions 43 and 44 cannot execute regardless of what fee they offer. This is the second most common cause and the least obvious one.

Check whether it is actually pending or has failed. A failed transaction shows as failed, not pending, and has already consumed gas.

Fix one: wait

Base fees fall when blocks are less than half full. A transaction stuck during a peak frequently clears within hours as demand subsides.

This costs nothing and works more often than people expect. The reader case we wrote up last month resolved itself in two hours while the user was being socially engineered by someone offering to fix it.

Fix two: speed up

Resubmit the same transaction with the same nonce and a higher fee. Most wallets have a button for this.

The network treats the replacement as superseding the original. Most implementations require the new fee to exceed the old by a meaningful margin, commonly around ten percent, or the replacement is rejected.

You pay the new fee, not both.

Fix three: cancel

Send a transaction to yourself, for zero value, using the same nonce, with a higher fee. It replaces the stuck transaction and does nothing.

You still pay the cancellation fee. What you avoid is the original transaction executing later at a moment you did not choose, which matters if it was a trade or an approval.

The nonce trap

If several transactions are pending, fixing the wrong one achieves nothing.

Find the lowest pending nonce and fix that one first. The queue behind it will then process in order. Attempting to speed up a later transaction while an earlier one is stuck is a common and entirely wasted operation.

Most wallets show the nonce in advanced transaction details. Some hide it, in which case the explorer shows it.

What does not work

Resubmitting from a different wallet. Same address, same queue.

Clearing the wallet’s local cache. This removes the transaction from your view, not from the network. It will still execute when conditions allow, which produces a genuinely unpleasant surprise.

Anyone who offers to push it through. There is no such service. Every message offering one is an attempt to obtain your recovery phrase, and they arrive within minutes of any public post about a pending transaction.

Preventing it

Use your wallet’s suggested fee rather than a manual reduction. Check the current base fee before submitting during volatile periods. Avoid submitting during the daily peak if the operation is not urgent.

For withdrawals from a platform, the network fee is typically handled by the venue. Platforms that publish the fee separately, such as venues that quote the network fee separately, let you see what is actually being charged for the network rather than bundling it into a single figure.