Gas is a measurement roughly equivalent to computational steps (for Ethereum). Every transaction is required to include a gas limit and a fee that it is willing to pay per gas; miners have the choice of including the transaction and collecting the fee or not. Every operation has a gas expenditure; for most operations, it is ~3–10, although some expensive operations have expenditures up to 700 and a transaction itself has an expenditure of 21000.
Source: https://hackernoon.com/blockchain-dictionary-f4d098c9ef89