ETH Staking Reward Calculator

An Ethereum validator is a 32 ETH deposit bound to a signing key, and its income has two independent sources. Consensus layer issuance pays for attestation duties, occasional block proposals and sync committee membership; the protocol scales the per-validator base reward with the inverse square root of total staked ETH, so the yield curve falls as the validator set grows rather than being fixed. Execution layer income is separate and consists of priority fees plus any value captured through block building, commonly routed through MEV-Boost. In practice consensus issuance has contributed roughly 2.5 to 3.5 percent annually at recent stake levels, with tips and extractable value adding a variable half a percent to a couple of percent, which is why 3 to 5 percent APR is the working range in this calculator. Penalties are close to symmetric with rewards for ordinary faults: a validator that is offline loses roughly what it would have earned, so a few days of downtime costs days of yield rather than principal. Slashing is different and applies only to provable equivocation such as double proposals or surrounding votes; it starts with an immediate deduction and adds a correlation penalty that scales with how many validators offend in the same window, which is what makes running duplicate copies of one key the most dangerous operator error. The main limitation of a flat APR projection is that rewards do not auto-compound on a solo validator, since only balance above the effective cap is skimmed out as partial withdrawals, and that APR itself drifts with total stake.

Proof of stake for Ethereum was an eight-year research programme before it shipped. Two competing lines of work, Vlad Zamfir correct-by-construction Casper and the Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget design written up by Vitalik Buterin and Virgil Griffith in 2017, converged into Gasper, which pairs the Casper finality gadget with the LMD GHOST fork choice rule. That combination fixed both the 32 ETH deposit size and the attestation-based reward structure that this calculator prices. The deposit contract opened in November 2020 and the Beacon Chain went live on 1 December 2020 once the launch threshold of 16,384 validators had been met, running in parallel with the proof-of-work chain for nearly two years. The Merge on 15 September 2022 retired mining and made those validators responsible for the live network, at which point priority fees started flowing to proposers and effective yields rose above pure issuance. Staked ETH remained locked until the Shanghai and Capella upgrades on 12 April 2023 enabled both partial reward withdrawals and full exits, which is the point at which staking became a normal yield instrument rather than a one-way bet. The Pectra upgrade in 2025 raised the maximum effective balance far above 32 ETH, allowing large operators to consolidate many validators into single entries and compound rewards natively.