Bitcoin mining in Mexico: run the numbers first

The pitch usually goes like this: Mexico has cheap living costs, warm weather, plenty of space outside the cities, and power bills that look tiny compared with California. Why not set up a few miners at the house in Mérida or a small warehouse near Querétaro? The short answer is that the cheap Mexican electricity you've heard about only exists in small, subsidized household blocks. Plug in a single modern mining machine and you lose the subsidy.

This guide is written for expats, retirees and foreign investors weighing up mining in Mexico. It covers the legal picture, how CFE pricing actually works, a worked example in pesos and dollars against Texas power, and the practical traps: rented homes, heat, noise, imports, taxes and cloud-mining scams.

How mining works, briefly

Bitcoin miners compete to add the next block of transactions. Machines hash guesses at enormous speed until one meets the target the network sets; the winner earns the block reward, currently 3.125 BTC plus transaction fees. That race is run on ASICsApplication-specific integrated circuit: a chip built to do one job, here computing bitcoin's SHA-256 hash. It can't do anything else., and a machine's speed is its hashrateHow many guesses per second a machine or the whole network makes. A single miner is measured in TH/s; the network in EH/s (a million TH/s)..

The network adjusts its difficultyHow hard it is to find a valid block. It resets every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, rising when more machines join. every two weeks to keep blocks coming about every ten minutes. Hashrate Index put the network near 950 EH/s at the end of September 2026. As more machines switch on worldwide, each existing machine earns less bitcoin, even if nothing changes in your garage.

Is it legal to mine bitcoin in Mexico?

Yes. No law bans mining and there's no licence for it. Mexico's Fintech Law regulates platforms and financial technology institutions that handle virtual assets; it doesn't mention mining. You can run a miner at home or in a commercial space as long as you pay for the power. The wider rules on exchanges, banks and AML are in our guide to whether crypto is legal in Mexico.

Power theft is a different story. Article 368 of the Federal Criminal Code treats using electricity without right as theft. That's what the headline case is about. In early September 2026, Puebla authorities seized a farm in Tlaola, in the Sierra Norte near the Nuevo Necaxa dam, first reported with about 300 machines. During the federal search on September 11, the Navy counted 1,032 devices at the same property, according to Uno TV, along with transformers and satellite antennas. Decrypt and El Financiero reported that investigators are focused on irregular connections to the grid. As far as we could find, no arrests had been announced.

CFE rates: why "cheap Mexican power" doesn't apply to miners

Mexican homes are billed on residential tariffs: 1 for temperate areas such as Mexico City, and 1A to 1F for hotter regions, which get a larger subsidized allowance in summer. The first blocks are cheap. In June 2026, CFE figures reported by Uno TV put tariff 1 at MXN 1.125 per kWh for the basic block, 1.369 for the intermediate block and 4.004 for anything above.

The catch is DAC (Doméstica de Alto Consumo, the high-consumption household rate). If your average over the past 12 months exceeds your tariff's limit, CFE reclassifies the account and removes the subsidy entirely. Monthly limits run from 250 kWh on tariff 1 to 2,500 kWh on 1F, the tariff for the hottest places such as Mexicali.

A 3,500 W miner running 24/7 uses 84 kWh a day, roughly 2,520 kWh a month. One machine breaks the limit on every household tariff, even 1F. And because DAC uses a rolling 12-month average, getting back off it takes months after you unplug.

Mexican rates come from CFE data as reported by Récord and Uno TV; Texas averages come from the US Energy Information Administration and are preliminary. Dollar conversions use about MXN 18.7 per dollar. We couldn't load CFE's own tariff pages, which blocked our access, so treat the peso figures as a reference and check a current bill. The DAC rate also carries a fixed charge of MXN 145.79 a month and varies by region, from about 6.14 in the north to 7.13 in Baja California Sur.

Commercial and industrial tariffs

A business contract moves you to PDBT (small demand, low voltage), GDBT (large demand, low voltage), GDMTO (medium voltage) or GDMTH (medium voltage with time-of-day pricing, for 100 kW and above). Medium voltage means your own transformer, and the bill adds capacity and distribution charges on top of energy, so the effective price depends on your load profile. We couldn't verify current official per-kWh figures for these tariffs. Ask CFE to quote your planned load and what paperwork it needs; as a foreigner you may be asked for an RFC (tax ID).

Worked example: one ASIC, in pesos and dollars

This isn't a forecast. It's a snapshot with stated assumptions, so you can see which variables matter.

Assumptions:

• Machine: Bitmain Antminer S21, 200 TH/s at 3,500 W per the manufacturer's spec sheet.
• Revenue per unit of hashrate: 0.000477 BTC per PH/s per day, the hashpriceExpected gross revenue per unit of hashrate per day, before electricity. It falls when difficulty rises or the bitcoin price drops. Hashrate Index reported on September 28, 2026.
• Bitcoin price: MXN 1,497,962 (about US$80,000), CoinGecko snapshot from October 26, 2026.
• Pool fee: 2%, an assumption; pools charge different rates.

That machine earns about 0.0000953 BTC a day, roughly MXN 143 (US$7.60), or about MXN 140 after the pool fee. Everything then hinges on your power price. At DAC central rates you lose about MXN 425 a day, close to MXN 12,750 a month. At a hypothetical MXN 2.00 business rate you still lose around MXN 28 a day. Break-even sits near MXN 1.67 per kWh, about 8.9 US cents. At the Texas industrial average you'd clear roughly MXN 27 (US$1.50) a day, before paying for the hardware.

That gap is the whole story. A US miner on an industrial contract in Texas competes with a Mexican household paying four to five times more per kWh. Large Texas operators also often sign power contracts below the state average and get paid to curtail during grid stress under ERCOT programmes. Unless you can lock in something comparable in Mexico, the machine is better off in Texas or in a hosting facility abroad.

And even the most favourable row leaves out the machine's purchase price, which varies widely between new and used; wiring; cooling; repairs and downtime. Revenue isn't fixed either. Rising difficulty or a falling price cuts it, and about every four years the halvingThe halving cuts the block reward in half every 210,000 blocks. The last one, in April 2024, took it to 3.125 BTC. halves the block reward; the next is expected around 2028.

Renting, heat and noise: the expat-specific problems

Rented homes. Most foreigners rent, and the CFE contract stays in the owner's name. Pushing the account onto DAC raises the bill for up to a year after you leave, which is exactly the kind of thing that ends up in a deposit dispute. Read your lease, and expect most landlords to say no once they understand the load.

Heat. Bitmain lists an operating range of 0 to 45 °C for the S21. Summer afternoons in Mexicali, Hermosillo or Monterrey regularly pass 40 °C in the shade, and an enclosed room gets hotter. Air conditioning to cool the miner adds even more consumption. Coastal humidity in Cancún or Puerto Vallarta adds corrosion risk.

Noise and voltage. The S21 is rated at 76 dBA, roughly a loud vacuum cleaner, around the clock. Condo rules and close neighbours make that a non-starter in most of the places expats live. The machine also needs a 220–277 V circuit at about 20 A, while most Mexican outlets are 127 V, so you'd need an electrician.

Altitude. The spec sheet lists a maximum operating altitude of 2,000 m. Mexico City, Puebla and Toluca sit higher, and thinner air cools less well. We don't know how much that affects each model in practice, so ask the seller.

Bringing ASICs into Mexico

Most miners ship from China or the US. Imports into Mexico generally pay import VAT (IVA), usually 16%, plus whatever duty applies to the equipment's tariff classification and a customs broker's fee. We couldn't verify the current tariff classification or duty rate for ASIC miners, so get a written answer from a Mexican customs broker before you buy. Carrying several machines in your luggage doesn't avoid that process: customs can treat them as a commercial import.

Pools, payouts and cashing out

Solo mining with one machine is a lottery ticket. At 200 TH/s against roughly 950 EH/s, you'd find a block about once every 90 years on average. That's why miners join a mining poolA group of miners that combines hashrate and splits rewards by contribution, minus a fee to the pool operator., which finds blocks regularly and pays you a share minus its fee.

Have payouts sent to a wallet you control; our guide to crypto wallets in Mexico covers the options. Cashing out to pesos works like any other bitcoin: send it to an exchange with SPEI withdrawals. Peso accounts on Mexican exchanges usually need a CURP, which residents can get and tourists typically can't. The routes are in our guide to selling crypto in Mexico.

Cloud mining: the scam that sounds sensible

"Cloud mining" sells you hashrate in someone else's farm, with daily bitcoin payouts and no hardware. Most offers pushed on social media are Ponzi schemes: fixed high returns paid from new deposits, referral bonuses, and withdrawals that freeze until you pay a "release fee".

Pi Network isn't mining

Pi Network popularized the idea of "mining on your phone". It isn't proof-of-work mining: the app records that you checked in and allocates Pi by its own rules, with no meaningful computation. How to buy, sell or move Pi is covered in our Pi Network guide.

Taxes on mined coins

If you're a Mexican tax resident, Mexico taxes your worldwide income, but its tax law has no mining chapter and we found no SAT ruling on it. A common view is that mined coins are income when received, at market value, with deductible expenses such as electricity if you operate as a business, and a separate gain or loss when you sell. Others read it differently. US citizens living in Mexico also report mined coins to the IRS as income. Keep a record of every pool payout with its date and peso value, plus your power bills, and see our Mexico crypto tax guide.

Who can make it work?

Only people with cheap, legal power: a negotiated industrial contract, surplus from their own generation, or energy that would otherwise be wasted. Rooftop solar helps less than people expect. With about five peak sun hours a day you'd need roughly 17 kW of panels to cover one miner's 84 kWh daily (a rough estimate), and it only produces during daylight.

For most expats, owning bitcoin means buying it. Our guide to buying bitcoin in Mexico covers SPEI, cards and cash. If you'd rather hold price exposure in a brokerage account, see bitcoin ETFs from Mexico.