What Is Rent in Solana?
Rent is the mechanism that charges accounts for storing data on the Solana blockchain. Every account must maintain a minimum SOL balance proportional to its data size to remain on-chain.
Rent exemption
In practice, all accounts on Solana today are rent-exempt. An account is rent-exempt when it holds at least 2 years’ worth of rent. The minimum balance depends on the account’s data size:
| Account size | Minimum balance (approx.) |
|---|---|
| 0 bytes (system account) | 0.00089 SOL |
| 165 bytes (token account) | 0.00204 SOL |
| 200 bytes | 0.00227 SOL |
Use getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption to calculate the exact amount for any data size.
What happens if an account is not rent-exempt
Accounts that fall below the rent-exempt threshold are removed from the network at the end of a transaction. This SOL is unrecoverable. Programs must ensure accounts are funded above the threshold when creating them.
Recovering rent
When you close an account (set its data to zero and transfer all lamports out), the rent deposit is returned to the recipient.
Sources
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