Reduced Rent

Reduced Rent

Phased Rollout • Solana Foundation

"Rent" is a misleading name. It isn't a fee. Rent is a fully refundable bond that pays for the storage an account occupies on every validator. Solana requires accounts to hold a minimum balance sized to their data, and when that account is closed, the lamports are returned in full to whoever closes it. SIMD-0437 reduces the constant behind that bond, lamports_per_byte, from 6,960 down to 696 — a 90% cut — rolled out in five separate feature-gated steps rather than a single change.

Technical Details

What Rent Actually Pays For

Every Solana account must hold enough lamports to cover the cost of storing the on-chain state for the account. This minimum balance is held against the account and returned when the account is closed. The intent is for a user to "rent" the storage space on chain. When the account is closed, validators no longer have to store that state, so the amount is refunded.

The Lamports-Per-Byte Constant

The minimum balance for an account is calculated as:

min_balance = (128 + data_size) * lamports_per_byte

The 128 is a fixed account storage overhead, and data_size is the size of the account in bytes. lamports_per_byte is currently 6,960, a constant set years ago and never adjusted since. Because it was fixed in lamports rather than tied to any actual validator storage cost, its real-world cost has moved independently of what storage actually costs to provide. Additionally, there has been concern that cheaper storage costs for accounts would lead to a large demand spike in on-chain storage space.

Rent Case Study

Assuming a payments business wants to create one million token accounts for their users, the current on-chain cost of rent would be one million accounts times $0.159 for an SPL token account rent deposit. So a business would pay $159,000 at the time of this writing. However, once all five rent-reduction feature gates are active on mainnet and assuming similar economics, the cost of an SPL token account's rent would be $0.0159, resulting in a total cost of $15,900. A reduction of this size could make it practical for many more businesses to cover rent on behalf of their users, making onboarding easier.

Five-Step Phased Rollout

To address concerns about a rapid spike in on-chain state, core developers chose to roll out rent reduction in a five-step phased approach. Rather than cut lamports_per_byte to 696 in one move, SIMD-0437 splits the reduction across five independent feature gates. Each step activates separately. Core developers will determine if they can proceed with the next feature activation or if they need to gather more data on state demand.

All five feature gates are currently inactive. Each one is independent, so the network can stop advancing at any step if the data doesn't support moving forward.

Fallback Safeguard

A sixth feature gate exists specifically to reverse course: if a step causes unexpected state growth or other issues, this fallback resets lamports_per_byte back to 6,960, the current value, without disrupting existing accounts. This is paired with SIMD-0392, which allows rent to be raised again later if empirical state growth turns out to be a problem.

Umberto, a data researcher at the Solana Foundation, has done an in-depth analysis of the potential state growth issue when rent is reduced by 90%. His research suggests that the 90% reduction will not cause systemic risk to the cluster. The payoff for users is substantial: the rent deposit for a standard SPL token account falls from about $0.159 to $0.0159, a tenfold drop that makes account creation dramatically cheaper. Lowering rent by 90% puts Solana's onboarding costs in range of payment-specialized chains. Read more here: Rent Reduction on Solana: A Data-Backed Analysis.

About This Upgrade

Solana will decrease rent by 90%. Cheaper rent means it costs less SOL to create token accounts, PDAs, and any other on-chain state. The rent amount is fully refundable but still has to be deposited up front. That's a real cost reduction for developers and users doing onboarding, minting, or account creation at scale.

This upgrade doesn't change what rent exemption means or how the bond mechanism works. The change only recalibrates the cost of rent, resulting in a 90% reduction in costs for end users and businesses.

Learn more: Solana Upgrades