The short answer is no, and it has been no for most people in this country since about 2022. But that answer is more interesting than it looks, because the reason keeps changing and because there are still narrow circumstances where the arithmetic flips.
Here is what mining actually earns on a single RTX 4090 today, and the electricity price at which each coin stops making money.
| Ravencoin | 7.82p per kWh |
| Monero on a Ryzen 9 7950X, not a GPU | 12.55p per kWh |
| Ergo | 2.30p per kWh |
| Ethereum Classic | 0.72p per kWh |
| Kaspa | effectively zero |
Set those against what electricity actually costs. The price cap puts most UK households somewhere north of 25p per kWh. Even on Octopus Agile, which tracks the wholesale market and is far cheaper than a standard tariff at the right moments, today's cheapest half hour in Eastern England was 13.77p.
Monero's break-even today was 12.55p. The cheapest electricity available anywhere in the day was 13.77p. It missed by 1.2 pence.
That near-miss is the honest state of UK mining in one line. Not absurdly far off — close enough that on a windier night, or with a slightly more efficient chip, the sign flips. But on the day, on the best tariff, in the cheapest half hour, still negative.
Why Kaspa is the cautionary tale
Kaspa is worth dwelling on because it shows how fast this changes. It was one of the best GPU coins going, widely recommended, genuinely profitable on consumer hardware. Then purpose-built ASICs arrived.
The network now runs at roughly 330 petahashes per second. A 4090 contributes about 1.85 gigahashes. That is a share of around six billionths, which works out at approximately £0.0002 a day — two hundredths of a penny. Not marginal. Not close. Over.
Anyone still following a 2023 guide recommending Kaspa on GPUs is burning electricity for nothing. This is why a calculator that pulls live network hashrate matters more than a well-written article from two years ago.
The cases where it still works
Three, and they are narrower than the internet suggests.
Genuinely cheap power. Not a good fixed tariff — properly cheap. Solar export you would otherwise sell at 4–5p, or the negative-price half hours that occasionally appear on Agile when it is windy overnight. At those prices Ravencoin and Monero clear comfortably.
Winter heat displacement. A 300W card in a room you were going to heat anyway is not really costing you 300W. It is replacing heating you would have bought. From October to March that can knock 70% off the effective power cost, and it is the single most underrated factor in home mining. It only holds if the heat lands somewhere you actually want it — a rig in the garage in July is pure loss.
Hardware you already own. If the card is sitting idle and you treat the electricity as the only cost, the bar is far lower than if you are buying a £1,500 GPU and need to recover it. Almost nobody recovers hardware cost from mining in the UK at current prices.
What about ASICs?
Better economics per unit of power, worse everything else. A modern Bitcoin miner earns real money at 6–8p per kWh, which is why industrial mining has concentrated in Texas, Paraguay and Ethiopia rather than Hertfordshire. It is also loud — genuinely loud, in the region of 75–90 decibels, which is not a spare-room proposition. And you are buying a machine with one function whose resale value tracks a market you cannot predict.
The comparison nobody makes
If your conviction is that a coin will appreciate, mining is a peculiarly inefficient way to act on it. You are converting electricity into coin at a poor exchange rate while taking on hardware risk, noise, heat and complexity. Buying the coin gives you the same exposure without any of that.
Mining makes sense when you have an edge on the input cost — free heat, free power, hardware already paid for. It rarely makes sense as a way to acquire crypto. That distinction is where most home mining economics go wrong, and it is not a conclusion any site funded by hardware referrals will put in front of you.
Check it yourself
These figures are true on the day they were calculated and will be wrong within weeks. Difficulty moves, prices move, tariffs move. Our mining calculator runs the same arithmetic against live data for your region, your hardware and today's actual half-hourly rates.
Figures calculated 14 August 2026 from live data: Octopus Agile rates for Eastern England, CoinGecko prices, and network hashrate taken directly from each chain. Assumes an RTX 4090 at typical tuned settings, a 1% pool fee, and excludes hardware cost and tax.