Solana Transaction Fees: What You Pay and Why Trades Fail

How much does a Solana transaction cost?

Solana counts fees in lamports. A lamport is the smallest unit of SOL: 1 SOL is 1,000,000,000 lamports. Every transaction pays 5,000 lamports for each signature. A signature is the approval your wallet adds when you click confirm, and most wallet actions need just one.

Including priority fees, the average Solana transaction cost about $0.0035 in the week to 28 October 2026, with SOL at about $100. App fees on swaps and bot trades come on top (see the table below).

The four costs in a Solana transaction

A transaction can carry four costs: the base fee, a priority fee, a Jito tip and account deposits (rent).

Base fee

Every transaction pays 5,000 lamports per signature, so one with two signers pays 10,000. Half is burned (destroyed for good) and half goes to the validator, the computer that adds your transaction to a block.

Unlike Ethereum gas, Solana’s base fee doesn’t rise when the network is busy.

Priority fees and how to calculate them

A priority fee is an optional extra that moves your transaction up the queue. It’s priced per compute unit, which is a unit of work. Each transaction sets a CU limit (the most work it can use) and a CU price in micro-lamports. A micro-lamport is one millionth of a lamport.

The formula is: priority fee in lamports = CU price x CU limit / 1,000,000, rounded up.

Say an app asks for 200,000 CU at 10,000 micro-lamports. That’s 2,000 lamports. Add the 5,000 base fee and you pay 7,000 lamports, or 0.000007 SOL. Cut the limit to 50,000 CU and the priority fee drops to 500 lamports.

You pay for the limit you ask for, not the work you use, so an app that asks for too much makes you overpay. The protocol’s default price is 0, and your wallet or app sets one. The default limit is 200,000 CU per instruction (3,000 for built-in ones), up to 1.4 million per transaction. All of the priority fee goes to the validator, none burned.

Jito tips

Jito is validator software that runs an auction for block space. A tip is your bid: a plain SOL transfer, separate from the priority fee, to one of 8 Jito tip accounts, with a minimum of 1,000 lamports. When the tip sits in the same transaction as the trade, a failed trade doesn’t pay the tip, but the base and priority fees are still charged.

Sent through Jito, a tip can help a trade land sooner and keeps it out of public view, lowering the chance that bots see your trade and profit by placing trades around it.

Tips confuse people on a block explorer: Solscan’s Fee and Priority Fee fields leave them out. The tip shows up as a SOL transfer to a Jito tip account in the Balance Changes tab.

Account deposits (rent)

Every Solana account must hold a minimum SOL balance, often called rent. It’s a deposit, not a fee, and you get it back when you close the account. Your wallet opens a token account for each token you hold. A standard one needs 0.00203928 SOL, about $0.20.

A brand-new wallet has no token accounts, so the first time it receives a token, someone pays that deposit. The owner can close it once the token balance is zero. The owner also picks where the refund goes, so if a sender paid the deposit for your account, the SOL comes back to you, not them.

Opening a Meteora DLMM position takes about 0.059 SOL, refunded when you withdraw all your liquidity and close the position.

If you’re the first LP in those price bins, you also pay about 0.075 SOL per new bin array, the account that stores a set of price bins. That part isn’t refunded, since other LPs may use those bins later. Ranges wider than 69 bins need an extra deposit that grows with the range, refunded on close. Meteora shows the total before you add liquidity, each line marked Refundable or Non-Refundable.

As a DLMM LP, I’d read the Non-Refundable line before clicking. On a small deposit into a fresh pool with empty bins, 0.075 SOL per bin array can eat a real share of what the position earns.

What common actions cost on Solana

App fees depend on the DeFi apps you use, from none on a plain SOL send to a 1% bot fee on a Trojan buy.

If you’re swapping tokens for the first time, the token account deposit and the wallet’s swap fee are the two lines that surprise people. On a $100 Phantom swap, the 0.85% fee is $0.85.

How to set priority fees and tips

Most people only need these settings when trades keep failing or landing late.

In Phantom

Priority fee and tip both start on Auto, set from live network conditions. To change them, tap the swap settings icon in the top right of the swap screen. You can set each one by hand from 0.00001 SOL to 1 SOL. Slippage can be Auto or anything from 0.1% to 30%.

If a swap keeps expiring at a busy moment, raise the priority fee one step at a time instead of jumping to a big number. An expired swap never reached a block, so it costs nothing, unlike a swap that lands and fails.

A few flows skip Phantom’s 0.85% swap fee, such as swapping USDC or USDT into its Cash account.

In Jupiter

Ultra Mode sets slippage, the priority fee and routing for you, and sends trades privately to resist MEV. Jupiter’s Ultra fee is 0% to 0.5% depending on the pair: low for stable pairs, higher for volatile ones such as new tokens.

Manual Mode charges no Jupiter fee. You set slippage and the priority fee yourself, and pay a Jito tip if you send through Jito.

Gasless is the escape hatch when you’re short on SOL. On an Ultra trade, if you hold under 0.01 SOL and the trade is about $10 or more, Jupiter covers the network costs and the token account deposit. It takes them back through a higher swap fee, and stops working once you set your own slippage or priority fee.

In Axiom and Trojan

Trading terminals such as Axiom and Telegram trading bots such as Trojan show two network settings: a priority fee and a tip, often called a bribe. You pay both on every buy and every sell, on top of the app’s own fee. Both are flat SOL amounts, so they hurt more on small trades.

Trojan’s Fast and Turbo presets are 0.0015 SOL and 0.0075 SOL priority fees. Its own fee is 1% per buy and sell, or 0.9% with a referral.

On a 0.1 SOL buy, Turbo is 7.5% of the trade before the 1% bot fee. On a 1 SOL buy it’s 0.75%. Fast on that same 0.1 SOL buy is 1.5%. On small Trojan buys I’d keep Fast and save Turbo for launches where landing first is the whole point.

Each Axiom preset holds its own priority fee, bribe and MEV mode. Set them for the size you actually trade. I’ve used Axiom extensively, and snipe settings copied from someone else are the quickest way to burn through a 0.2 SOL buy.

Why Solana transactions fail, and how to fix them

A failed transaction still pays its network fee, so find the cause before you retry. The biggest public data set is a study of 1.5 billion failed transactions from August 2023 to July 2024. Bots failed 58.43% of the time and people 6.22%, so the cause shares below come mostly from bots. The data also predates today’s faster slots.

The price moved past your slippage

Slippage is how far the price can move between your quote and your trade before the trade cancels itself. “Price or profit not met” was the biggest single cause in the study, about 48% of failures.

Fix: get a fresh quote and retry, or let Auto slippage in Phantom or Jupiter Ultra choose. On fast-moving tokens, widen slippage only a little. Wider slippage lets you fill at a worse price and gives MEV bots more room.

Blockhash not found or expired

Every transaction carries a recent blockhash. It’s the ID of a recent block, a bit like a timestamp, and it stays valid for about 150 slots. A slot is the short window in which one block is made. Since 9 October 2026 slots are about 200ms, so a blockhash now expires in about 30 seconds, half the old 60.

Wait too long to sign, or sit in a busy queue, and it expires. An expired transaction never lands, so it isn’t in the study’s data and is never charged.

Fix: check Solscan or your wallet history before you retry. Only re-sign when the wallet says the transaction expired, or about 30 seconds have passed with no result. The 30 seconds is only a rough guide, so don’t rely on it alone: re-sign only once your wallet or Solscan shows the first one expired or failed, or you could buy twice. Sign promptly, and if the network is busy, raise the priority fee a step.

Not enough SOL for fees or deposits

You need SOL for fees and for the deposit on any new account. Holding only USDC won’t pay them. The error usually mentions “insufficient funds” or “rent”. People ran out of funds more often than bots did.

Fix: keep enough SOL for the deposits you plan, not just the fees. If your money is on another chain, bridge SOL over first.

Simulation failed before you sign

Your wallet test-runs, or simulates, every transaction before you sign it. “Simulation failed” means it would fail on-chain. Nothing has been sent or charged yet.

Fix: read the reason under the warning. It’s usually one of the causes above: slippage, a low balance or a stale quote. Don’t force it through.

Where to check live Solana transaction (gas) fees

QuickNode’s priority fee tracker shows live average prices per compute unit. Run them through the formula above to turn them into lamports.

Token Terminal charts the weekly average fee per transaction, base plus priority fees. Its latest week, to 28 October 2026, came out at about $0.0035.

DefiLlama’s Solana fees page leads with the fees users paid to apps, $10.91m in the 24 hours to 28 October 2026. The network’s own transaction fees were $538,017 over the same day and $24.36m over 30 days. So don’t read the headline as what users paid validators.

For one transaction, open it in Solscan. Read Fee, Priority Fee and Compute Units Consumed, then check Balance Changes for any tip.

FAQ

Is Solana cheaper than Ethereum to use?

For a basic send, yes. Solana’s base fee is fixed at 0.000005 SOL, about $0.0005. A plain SOL send costs about $0.0005, usually well below an ETH transfer. Swap against swap, Solana’s network fees are also usually below a Uniswap swap’s, though app fees on Solana can outweigh the network fee. Ethereum’s gas moves with demand, while Solana’s base fee doesn’t, so the gap changes from day to day.

How much does it cost to deploy a coin on Solana?

Creating an SPL token directly costs a mint account deposit plus metadata rent, paid in SOL. On pump.fun, there is no creation fee. You still pay the network fee and rent for the new mint, metadata and related accounts, plus whatever you spend on an optional first buy, and some sources say a 0.02 SOL charge still applies, so check the amount in your wallet before you confirm. Trades on the coin then carry the launchpad’s own fee.

How fast is a Solana transaction?

Slots have been about 200ms since 9 October 2026. Alpenglow, a new way for validators to agree on blocks, went live on 21 October 2026. It targets finality (the point where a transaction can’t be reversed) in about 150ms, down from about 12.8 seconds. That’s a design target, not a measured average. None of this changed the fees you pay.

How do I claim SOL back from old token accounts?

Sell or send the whole token balance to zero, then close the account with a tool such as Sol Incinerator. The 0.00203928 SOL goes to the address you choose. For a Meteora position, withdraw all your liquidity and close the position to get the roughly 0.059 SOL back.