Best Monero Mining Pools 2026: Comparison

Monero's network hashrate climbed past 4.1 GH/s in early 2026, almost double the level recorded when MineXMR voluntarily shut down in August 2022 after temporarily holding more than half of the network's mining power. That single incident reshaped how the community now thinks about pool selection: hashrate share, payout transparency, and decentralization carry as much weight as the headline fee. If you are spinning up a Ryzen rig, repurposing an Epyc server, or pointing a humble laptop at RandomX, the pool you join decides how often you get paid, how anonymous those payouts remain, and whether you are contributing to a healthy distribution of work or quietly recentralizing the chain. This guide compares the leading Monero mining pools operating in 2026, breaks down fee models and payout schemes, and shows how miners using services like MoneroSwapper convert pool earnings into other privacy-preserving assets without going near a KYC exchange.

Why pool selection still matters in 2026

Mining XMR solo remains technically possible — RandomX was engineered specifically to keep general-purpose CPUs competitive against ASICs — but for anyone running less than roughly 200 KH/s, the variance is unforgiving. A typical home rig might find a block once every few years on average, and the gap between expected and actual luck can stretch into months of empty payout files. Pool mining smooths that variance by distributing block rewards proportionally to submitted work, and in return the operator takes a small cut. The trade-offs, however, have shifted noticeably since the early days of pool mining in 2017.

• Decentralization pressure: after the MineXMR episode, the community publicly discourages joining any single pool that approaches 30 percent of network hashrate. Several large pools now display soft caps and politely redirect new miners when they grow too dominant.
• Fee compression: the median pool fee dropped from 1.0 percent in 2019 to around 0.6 percent in 2026, with P2Pool offering 0 percent at the cost of a slightly more involved setup.
• Privacy at payout: some pools still require an email address or a Cloudflare-protected dashboard login, which leaks metadata. The best 2026 options accept payouts to a fresh Subaddress with no account at all.
• Geographic coverage: stratum latency directly impacts share efficiency. A pool with a São Paulo, Singapore, or Frankfurt node will reject fewer stale shares from miners in those regions.
• Tail emission stability: since the main-curve emission ended in June 2022, every block now pays a flat 0.6 XMR plus fees from the mempool. Pool reward calculations are simpler than ever, but it also means there is no "lottery upside" left from variable block subsidies.

The pools that consistently rank at the top in 2026 are not always the ones with the largest hashrate — they are the ones that balance reliability, fee transparency, decentralization, and a clean privacy posture. That is the lens this comparison applies.

How Monero pool mining actually works today

A Monero pool runs a node that connects to the network, builds candidate block templates, and hands them out to miners over the Stratum protocol. Miners use XMRig (or one of its forks) to hash those templates with RandomX, the proof-of-work algorithm activated at fork height 1978433 in November 2019. When a miner finds a hash that satisfies the network difficulty, the pool submits the block, collects the 0.6 XMR reward plus mempool fees, deducts its commission, and distributes the rest to participants.

RandomX in 2026 and why pools still differ

RandomX runs a random program inside a 2 GB virtual machine, which forces miners to use general-purpose CPU features rather than specialized ASIC pipelines. Performance scales mostly with cache, memory bandwidth, and instruction throughput. That means a modern AMD Ryzen 9 7950X or Threadripper Pro 7995WX dominates the hashrate-per-watt rankings, while older Intel Xeon E5 chips remain surprisingly competitive on used-server budgets. Pools differ in how aggressively they tune share difficulty for low-end versus high-end miners, how they handle huge-page configuration, and whether they expose detailed per-worker stats.

Payout schemes you will actually encounter

Four schemes dominate the 2026 landscape. PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) pays you based on shares submitted during the last N shares before a block was found — most miners get slightly more than under PPS over time, but a long unlucky stretch hurts. PPS (Pay Per Share) pays a fixed amount per share regardless of pool luck, which means lower variance for the miner but the pool charges a higher fee to absorb the risk. SOLO mode lets you mine through the pool's infrastructure while keeping the entire block reward when you find one — useful for very large hashrate or pure decentralization. PROP (Proportional) splits each block strictly by shares during that block round; it is rare in 2026 because it encourages pool hopping.

Top Monero mining pools of 2026 — side by side

The comparison below covers fee, payout scheme, minimum payout threshold, whether a Tor onion endpoint is offered, and a one-line distinguishing feature. Hashrate share figures are rolling 30-day averages from early 2026.

P2Pool — the structural answer to MineXMR

P2Pool is not really a pool in the traditional sense. It is a peer-to-peer sidechain that pays miners directly on the main Monero chain through CLSAG-signed coinbase outputs. There is no operator, no fee, no minimum withdrawal that can be raised on a whim, and no centralized hashrate concentration risk. The downside is that you need to run your own monerod and a P2Pool node alongside XMRig, and minimum effective hashrate to consistently land share-blocks is around 1 KH/s on the "mini" sidechain. For anyone serious about Monero's decentralization, P2Pool is the default choice in 2026.

SupportXMR — the boring, reliable workhorse

SupportXMR has been online since 2017, has never lost user funds, and donates a portion of its operating margin to the Monero Community Crowdfunding System. Its fee sits at 0.6 percent, payouts arrive every few hours once you cross 0.004 XMR, and the dashboard works without JavaScript over its onion mirror. It is the pool most miners default to when they want a hosted experience and have no time to maintain a node.

MoneroOcean — the multi-algo opportunist

MoneroOcean auto-switches your CPU between RandomX and several other CryptoNight-family algorithms based on current profitability, then converts the earnings back to XMR before paying you. For miners with mixed hardware (older boxes that struggle on RandomX cache requirements but excel at GhostRider or KawPow), this is the single most profitable setup. The 1.0 percent fee is higher, but the routing intelligence often more than compensates.

HeroMiners, 2Miners, K1Pool, C3Pool — regional and niche choices

HeroMiners is the strongest of the smaller pools for SOLO mining — its infrastructure has lower share-rejection rates than many larger competitors, and its per-worker stats expose anomalies fast. 2Miners is widely used by miners who want Telegram alerts when payouts land. K1Pool dominates Eastern European latency. C3Pool is the easiest on-ramp for someone running their first XMRig instance, with a step-by-step generator that outputs a working config file from a Subaddress and CPU model.

Choosing and configuring your pool: a practical walkthrough

1. Estimate your effective hashrate. Run xmrig --bench on your target machine for thirty seconds. The reported H/s figure tells you whether you should aim for PPLNS on a large pool (under 5 KH/s), PPLNS on a mid-size pool (5–50 KH/s), or SOLO/P2Pool (above 50 KH/s).
2. Pick a payout scheme that matches your risk tolerance. PPLNS is the default for almost everyone in 2026. Choose SOLO only if you can stomach long dry spells and want the full 0.6 XMR plus mempool fees when a block lands.
3. Generate a fresh receiving Subaddress. In your CLI wallet, run address new "mining-payouts-2026". Never reuse a Subaddress across pools — separating them keeps view-key disclosures (if you ever share one with a tax advisor) scoped to one income stream.
4. Configure XMRig. Drop the pool URL, port, and your Subaddress into config.json. Set "tls": true, enable "huge-pages": true on Linux, and pin threads to physical cores with "cpu": {"max-threads-hint": 100}. For Tor-enabled pools, point XMRig at a local Tor SOCKS proxy and use the onion endpoint.
5. Monitor uptime and share efficiency for the first 48 hours. A healthy setup should reject under 1 percent of shares as stale. If you see 5 percent or higher, you are pointed at a geographically distant stratum endpoint — switch to a closer node.
6. Rotate pools quarterly. Even if your current pool performs well, periodically moving 10–20 percent of your hashrate to a smaller pool keeps the hashrate distribution healthy. The community openly publishes pool share percentages on miningpoolstats.stream and similar dashboards.

If your goal is privacy as well as profit, run P2Pool over Tor and pay out to a Subaddress that has never been seen on a centralized exchange. The combination of stealth address output handling and the absence of an account makes your mining income effectively untraceable from the pool side.

A practical example: small-scale miner in 2026

Take a miner running two AMD Ryzen 9 7950X machines in a home office, pulling roughly 36 KH/s combined after huge-page tuning. Pointed at SupportXMR with PPLNS, that hashrate earns approximately 0.018 XMR per day before electricity, or around 0.55 XMR per month. At a hypothetical 175 USD per XMR in mid-2026, that is roughly 96 USD monthly gross. Electricity at 0.12 USD per kWh and a combined 280 W draw burns through about 24 USD per month, leaving a net of around 72 USD.

The same hashrate pointed at P2Pool's main sidechain earns slightly less in raw XMR because share-blocks include a small consensus overhead, but the 0 percent fee narrows the gap to a fraction of a percent. The real benefit is that those coinbase outputs arrive directly on-chain, never touch a custodian, and avoid the small but real risk of a pool operator deciding to exit-scam or freeze withdrawals.

When this miner is ready to convert part of the accumulated XMR into Bitcoin for a hardware purchase, they route through MoneroSwapper with a freshly generated swap address. No account, no email, no KYC — the pool payouts move from a mining Subaddress straight into a swap, and the resulting BTC lands at a Wasabi-coinjoined receiving wallet. The chain of custody never includes a centralized exchange, which preserves the fungibility properties of the XMR earned through honest hashing.

FAQ

Are Monero mining pools KYC?

Almost none of the major XMR pools require identity verification in 2026. P2Pool, SupportXMR, MoneroOcean, HeroMiners, and C3Pool all accept a Subaddress as the only identifier. A handful of smaller pools optionally let you register an email to enable dashboard notifications, but it is not required to receive payouts. If a pool ever requests passport or ID upload, that is a red flag — leave immediately.

What is the practical difference between P2Pool and a traditional pool?

A traditional pool is a single server (or cluster) operated by one team that holds the keys to the coinbase outputs until they pay you. P2Pool is a separate proof-of-work sidechain whose blocks are themselves merged into Monero's coinbase, so payouts land directly on the main chain with no intermediary. There is no operator who could disappear, raise fees overnight, or be subpoenaed for a list of miner addresses. The trade-off is that you must run a small additional process and have a stable internet connection.

Is solo mining XMR viable in 2026?

Only if you control a very large hashrate — roughly 1 MH/s and up — or you are willing to wait months between blocks as a form of lottery. At the current 4.1 GH/s network hashrate, a single 7950X machine would average more than seven years between solo-found blocks. For everyone except institutional miners with rack-scale Epyc deployments, pool mining or P2Pool is the only rational option.

Can I mine Monero anonymously through Tor?

Yes. Most major pools publish a .onion stratum endpoint, and XMRig supports SOCKS5 proxying natively. Run a local Tor instance, point XMRig at 127.0.0.1:9050, and use the onion URL of your chosen pool. The latency penalty is typically 50–150 ms, which adds maybe 0.5 percent to your stale-share rate — a small price for not exposing your home IP to the pool operator and any passive observer between you and them.

How do I cash out pool payouts without an exchange?

The cleanest path is to accumulate XMR in a Subaddress dedicated to mining income, then move it through a no-account swap service when you need a different asset. MoneroSwapper handles this in one step: paste your destination address (BTC, ETH, LTC, USDT-TRC20, and so on), send your XMR from the mining wallet, and receive the converted asset directly. No KYC, no email, no holding period. Many miners use this monthly as part of their treasury management without ever creating an exchange account.

Conclusion

The best Monero mining pool in 2026 is not a single name on a leaderboard — it is whichever option matches your hashrate, your privacy posture, and your tolerance for self-hosting infrastructure. For most home miners with a few CPUs, P2Pool delivers genuine decentralization at zero fee and is the right structural choice. For miners who want a hosted experience with a long track record, SupportXMR remains the dependable default. For mixed hardware that benefits from algorithm switching, MoneroOcean still leads. Whichever you pick, the rest of the privacy stack matters as much as the pool itself: payouts to a fresh Subaddress, stratum traffic over Tor where available, and conversions through no-KYC services like MoneroSwapper when you are ready to rebalance into other assets. Mine the chain you want to exist — and keep the rewards as fungible as the protocol promises them to be.