How the fee is built
The base fee depends only on the number of signatures: most wallet transfers have one signature and pay 5,000 lamports (0.000005 SOL). The priority fee is the compute unit price you choose multiplied by the compute unit limit the transaction requests. One lamport is a million micro-lamports, so a price of 10,000 micro-lamports per CU with a 200,000 CU limit adds 2,000 lamports.
base fee = 5,000 lamports ร signatures
priority fee = ceil(CU price [micro-lamports] ร CU limit รท 1,000,000) lamports
total = base fee + priority fee
1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 lamportsLimit, not usage
The priority fee is charged on the compute unit limit the transaction declares, even if it uses fewer units. Without an explicit limit, each instruction gets a default of 200,000 CU, and a transaction can request up to 1.4 million. Wallets that simulate the transaction first and set a tight limit (a SOL transfer needs only a few hundred CU) pay a much smaller priority fee for the same price.
What price to choose
- Quiet network: a priority fee is often unnecessary; the base fee alone lands in a block within seconds.
- Busy periods (popular token launches, NFT mints): wallets raise the price to thousands or hundreds of thousands of micro-lamports per CU. Even then a simple transfer usually costs a fraction of a cent.
- Failed transactions still pay their fees. If a swap keeps failing on slippage, raising the priority fee will not help โ fix the slippage or the route.
Frequently asked questions
+How much is a normal Solana transaction fee?
5,000 lamports, 0.000005 SOL, for a one-signature transaction without a priority fee. At about $100 per SOL that is $0.0005.
+What is a micro-lamport?
One millionth of a lamport. Priority fees are priced per compute unit in micro-lamports so that fees for small transactions can be set precisely.
+Do I pay the priority fee if my transaction fails?
Yes. Fees are charged when the transaction is processed, whether it succeeds or fails.
+Why does my wallet show a different fee?
It may set its own compute unit limit, add a tip to a block-building service, or include account creation deposits, which are not fees but appear in the total.
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