Base Gas Tracker

How fees work on Base

Base is a layer 2 network, and fees on it are paid in ETH. Each transaction has two parts. The L2 execution fee covers processing the transaction on Base itself. The L1 security fee covers the estimated cost of publishing the transaction data to Ethereum. Base's own documentation notes that the L1 security fee is typically the larger of the two, so Ethereum activity often matters more than Base traffic.

The L2 execution fee follows EIP-1559 with a base fee and an optional priority fee. Base uses an elasticity multiplier of 6 and a base fee change denominator of 125. In practice this means the base fee can rise by at most 4% per block, and Base estimates it takes about 36 seconds of sustained demand for fees to double. That is a slower climb than the 12.5% per block allowed on Ethereum.

Base also enforces a minimum base fee of 0.005 gwei, or 5,000,000 wei, on both mainnet and the Sepolia testnet. The floor exists to keep fees from dropping so low that spam fills blocks and creates backlogs. According to Base, the minimum gives faster inclusion and more predictable pricing. Base's own example puts a typical 200,000 gas transaction at about $0.002 at this floor, assuming an ETH price of $2,000.

The L1 security fee moves with Ethereum, not with Base. When demand for Ethereum block space rises, the cost of posting Base data rises too, and every Base transaction pays a share of it. Wallets and apps can estimate this part before signing by calling the GasPriceOracle predeploy, using getL1Fee() for a precise value or getL1FeeUpperBound() for a quick upper estimate.

Fees on Base spike for two different reasons: heavy demand on Base pushes up the L2 base fee, and congestion on Ethereum pushes up the L1 security fee. Base's docs suggest sending non-urgent transactions when Ethereum activity is low, such as on weekends. The L1 fee is an estimate of the cost to publish your transaction on Ethereum, and the GasPriceOracle upper-bound method takes the transaction byte length as its input, so larger transactions carry a larger L1 part.

Sources: Base: Network fees · Ethereum EIPs: EIP-1559 Fee market change. Checked Sep 26, 2026.

How we measure Base gas

Every 5 minutes our server calls eth_feeHistory for the last 20 blocks on a live public Base RPC endpoint (last: api.zan.top). Slow, standard and fast are the next block’s base fee plus the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile of priority tips paid in those blocks. Block use: 11% of the gas target on average.

What is a gas fee? · What is gwei? · Base RPC endpoints