Archived article · Original source date: 2024-08-14
This article is preserved from the previous Solana Bulls site as a historical archive. It reflects its original context; references to products, people, market conditions, eligibility, or rules may no longer be current.
Solana stores persistent state in accounts. Creating an account requires enough lamports for the account to be rent-exempt at its allocated size, in addition to transaction fees.
What rent exemption means
The required balance is calculated from account size and cluster parameters. Applications should query the current minimum with RPC rather than copying a fixed historical number.
The balance is held in the account; it is not periodically consumed as a storage subscription. When a program supports closing the account, its remaining lamports can generally be returned to a specified destination.
Account size and ownership
Every account has an owner program. Only that program can modify its data or debit its lamports, subject to runtime rules. Developers must allocate enough space for the serialized state and any planned growth.
Resizing an account can require additional lamports to remain rent-exempt. Shrinking or closing state needs explicit program logic and careful authorization checks.
Costs developers should plan for
- The rent-exempt balance for each account's allocated bytes.
- Transaction base and priority fees.
- Compute and transaction-size limits.
- The number of accounts created for each user or position.
- Safe account-closing, migration, and authority procedures.
See the current account documentation and use the cluster's RPC calculation when estimating storage costs.