It now takes an average US private-sector employee more than a full-time year of work to earn enough to buy one BTC, roughly 2,127 hours as of September 2026, based on wage data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled by Protos. However, this figure is below the peak reached in July 2025, when the average BTC price of $115,101 equaled 394 working days, or about 1.6 years. The calculation uses gross wages, before taxes and living expenses, assuming the entire paycheck is spent on BTC. Since the first BTC-for-dollars sale in October 2009, when 5,050 BTC were traded for $5.02, the required work time has gone from under one second to several months, hitting 1,860 hours in October 2021 and 3,100 hours in October 2025. Since that peak, the BTC price measured in US working hours has been declining.
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