What is rent on Solana? A plain-English explanation
Short answer: Rent is a refundable deposit proportional to an account’s size. Accounts that hold at least the rent-exempt minimum live forever; closing one returns the deposit.
A deposit, not a fee
Storing data on thousands of validators has a cost. Solana charges it as a deposit: every account must hold a minimum balance based on its size in bytes. It isn’t spent — it’s returned when the account is closed.
How it’s calculated
Minimum balance = (account size + 128 bytes of overhead) × the rent rate × 2 years. A standard token account is 165 bytes. Never hardcode the number: since SIMD-0437 the rate is changing, so tools like SolRent ask the network for the current value.
Where your rent goes
Every token you’ve held, every NFT, every DeFi position opens accounts that hold rent. Token accounts are the easiest to recover because they can be closed by you alone once empty.
The numbers behind rent
Rent is charged per byte. Every account is billed for its data plus 128 bytes of overhead, at a rate set by the network, and must hold two years' worth to be "rent-exempt". In practice every normal account is rent-exempt, so rent works as a deposit rather than an ongoing charge.
- Before September 2026 the rate worked out to 6,960 lamports per byte. A 165-byte token account (293 bytes billed) needed 2,039,280 lamports.
- Since the September 2026 step of SIMD-0437 it is 5,080 lamports per byte, so the same account needs 1,488,440 lamports.
- 1 SOL is 1,000,000,000 lamports, so a legacy token account holds about 0.00204 SOL.
Rent vs transaction fees
They are different things. A transaction fee (5,000 lamports per signature, plus any priority fee) is paid to the network and is gone. Rent is a balance that stays inside the account and comes back when the account is closed. When a swap seems to cost more than expected, it is often because the swap opened a new token account and the rent deposit was taken from your wallet.
Which accounts hold your rent?
- Token accounts: one per token you hold or have held. The easiest to recover: once empty, you alone can close them.
- Wrapped SOL accounts: left behind by some swaps; closing them unwraps the SOL and returns the rent.
- NFT accounts and app positions: DeFi positions, staking accounts and NFTs also hold rent, but they are controlled by their own programs and are best closed through the app that created them.
Why the rate is changing
SIMD-0437 is a Solana improvement proposal that lowers the rent rate in steps, making it cheaper to create accounts. One side effect is that accounts created at the old rate now hold more than they need. That difference is called excess rent, and it can be withdrawn without closing the account.