Solana Rent

A fee mechanism on the Solana blockchain where accounts and programs pay to store data on-chain, with insufficient balances risking garbage collection.

What is Solana Rent?

Solana rent is a system designed to manage on-chain data storage by charging accounts and programs a fee, measured in Lamports (1 Lamport = 0.000000001 SOL), to maintain their data on the Solana blockchain. Each account, which holds digital assets like SOL, SPL tokens, or program states, requires a minimum balance to cover storage costs, proportional to the data size (e.g., ~0.001 SOL or 1 million Lamports for a basic token account). Introduced in Solana’s early design, rent ensures efficient resource allocation on a high-throughput network (up to 65,000 TPS). If an account’s balance falls below the rent threshold and is not topped up, it may be flagged for garbage collection, where the Solana runtime deallocates its storage, freeing up space.

Originally, rent was charged periodically (per epoch, ~2 days), but updates in 2022 shifted most accounts to a rent-exempt model, requiring a one-time upfront payment to store data permanently. As of September 2025, rent payments are less common due to widespread rent exemption, but non-exempt accounts still face a rate of approximately 19.2 Lamports per byte per year, per Solana’s documentation. For example, a 1 KB account incurs 19,200 Lamports annually ($0.001 at 2025 prices). This system supports Solana’s scalability, as seen in DeFi platforms like Orca, but requires users to monitor balances via wallets like Phantom to avoid data loss.