Do SegWit and Taproot addresses lower Bitcoin fees?
Yes. Spending from a native SegWit (bc1q) address takes about 68 vB per input and Taproot (bc1p) about 57.5 vB, versus 148 vB for a legacy (1…) address. At the same fee rate a one-input payment costs roughly 35–40% less than legacy.
The short version
Bitcoin charges by space, and the biggest part of a typical transaction is the signature data that proves you can spend each input. SegWit (activated in August 2017) moved that data into a separate “witness” section that counts at one quarter of the weight of other data. Taproot (activated in November 2021) built on SegWit with shorter Schnorr signatures. Both make spending cheaper.
How the discount works
BIP 141 defines a transaction’s weight as: non-witness bytes × 4 + witness bytes × 1. Its virtual size is weight ÷ 4. So a byte of signature costs a quarter of a byte of everything else. Legacy inputs carry their signatures in the non-witness part and get no discount.
That is why the per-input sizes differ so much:
| Address type | Looks like | Input size | Output size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legacy (P2PKH) | starts with 1 | ~148 vB | 34 vB |
| Nested SegWit (P2SH-P2WPKH) | starts with 3 | ~91 vB | 32 vB |
| Native SegWit (P2WPKH) | starts with bc1q | ~68 vB | 31 vB |
| Taproot (P2TR) | starts with bc1p | ~57.5 vB | 43 vB |
Note that an address starting with 3 might also be a multisignature or other script; the 91 vB figure applies to the common wrapped-SegWit single-key case.
Same payment, three wallets
A one-input, two-output payment (the payment plus change) comes out at roughly:
- Legacy: 10 + 148 + 2 × 34 = 226 vB
- Native SegWit: 10.5 + 68 + 2 × 31 = 140.5 → 141 vB
- Taproot: 10.5 + 57.5 + 2 × 43 = 154 vB
At 10 sat/vB that is 2,260 sats, 1,410 sats and 1,540 sats. The difference grows with every extra input: a five-input legacy spend is about 818 vB, while the same spend from native SegWit is about 413 vB.
The daily log prices all three shapes at today’s fee tiers so you can see the gap in dollars.
Why Taproot outputs are larger
A Taproot output commits to a 32-byte public key, while a native SegWit output commits to a 20-byte key hash. So paying to Taproot costs a few more vbytes, and spending from Taproot costs fewer. Over the life of a coin (received once, spent once) the two are close; Taproot’s other benefits are privacy (complex scripts can look like simple payments) and flexibility for multisig and scripts.
Address prefixes and checksums
Native SegWit v0 addresses use bech32 encoding (BIP 173), which is lower-case and has strong error detection. Taproot addresses use bech32m (BIP 350), a corrected checksum for witness version 1 and above. Older services that cannot send to bc1p addresses are becoming rare, but if a withdrawal form rejects your address, a native SegWit (bc1q) receive address is the widely supported fallback.
Should you move coins to a new address type?
Moving coins is itself a transaction with a fee, so it is only worth it if you will spend from the new address later at higher fee rates, or if you are consolidating many small coins anyway. A sensible approach:
- Make sure new receive addresses in your wallet are native SegWit or Taproot.
- When you need to consolidate, do it during a quiet period (check the backlog on the log) and send to a modern address type.
- Do not move coins solely to save a few cents.
For how fee rates themselves are set, see how Bitcoin fees are calculated. To size a specific transaction, use the fee estimator.
Questions people also ask
- Can I send from a SegWit address to a legacy address?
- Yes. All standard address types can pay each other. The type of address you spend from affects your input size; the type you pay to affects only the output size.
- Is Taproot always cheaper than native SegWit?
- For spending, a Taproot key-path input is smaller (about 57.5 vB vs 68 vB), but a Taproot output is larger (43 vB vs 31 vB). For a simple one-input, two-output payment, native SegWit is slightly smaller overall.
Sources
- BIP 141: Segregated Witness (consensus layer)
- BIP 173: Base32 address format for native v0-16 witness outputs (bech32)
- BIP 341: Taproot: SegWit version 1 spending rules
- BIP 350: Bech32m format for v1+ witness addresses
Prepared by Daily Crypto News from the sources above. Published 2026-10-15; last reviewed 2026-10-15. See our editorial standards. Not financial, tax or legal advice.