This is a question on everyone’s mind as they decide whether they want to get into Helium or not in 2022.
A Helium miner makes on average 0.08 HNT a day in March 2022. This amounts to about $1.75 per day in earnings.
By comparison, the Highest earning miner makes 1.9 HNT per day or $41.5.
How long before I can recover the investment in my Helium Miner?
If you paid $500 for your miner, you will recover your investment in 286 days. But this assumes that no additional miners are added to the Helium Network (not a realistic assumption).
It also assumes that the price of Helium doesn’t increase (could be a valid assumption if the network does not get traction with real users of the network). If the price of Helium goes down, the time to recover an investment is even longer.
The Calculation
Every month 2,500,000 Helium tokens are awarded in total.
Here’s how these 2.5M tokens are distributed:
| Awarded to | % Amount | HNT |
| Validators | 6 | 150,000 |
| Miners | 59 | 1,475,000 |
| Helium company and Investors | 35 | 875,000 |
| Total | 100 | 2,500,000 |
Today there are nearly 620,000 hotspots on the Helium Network. The average amount a miner can make every month is 1,475,000/620,000 = 2.38 HNT. Divide this by 30 gives about 0.08 HNT per day.
Update
In July of 2023, there are 936,804 miners on the network. Helium earnings have dropped significantly. I have pretty much stopped paying attention to my four miners. The blinking lights look pretty and that’s about it. I hope it’s providing connectivity to IoT devices nearby. But there’s really no incentive for me to keep these miners operational. Not worth my time.
While the price of miners have come down to between $100 and $300, with the price of HNT where it’s at, the time to recoup your investment is very far out into the future.
The biggest issue with Helium is the lack of IoT devices that use the network and until this problem is solved, interest in the Helium network will unfortunately stagnate. The big question on everyone’s mind is – what’s the killer app for Helium?