How much SOL can you recover by closing token accounts?

The short answer#

You recover 0.00203928 SOL for every empty standard SPL token account you close, so the total is simply the number of empty accounts multiplied by about 0.00204. Ten empty accounts is roughly 0.02 SOL, fifty is 0.102 SOL, and five hundred is just over 1 SOL. Network fees take a fraction of a percent, and a bulk tool's fee, where you use one, comes out of the recovered amount.

How much SOL is locked in one token account?#

One standard SPL token account holds exactly 2,039,280 lamports, which is 0.00203928 SOL. That is the rent-exempt minimum for 165 bytes of account data under Solana's formula, (128 + bytes) x 6,960 lamports. The amount is identical for every SPL token, because every SPL token account has the same layout. The background is in what Solana rent is.

Other account types you may be able to close hold different amounts:

Account type	Size	Rent returned on close
SPL token account	165 bytes	0.00203928 SOL
Token-2022 associated token account (typical)	170 bytes	0.00207408 SOL
Token-2022 account with more extensions	larger	more, scaling with size
Wrapped SOL account	165 bytes	0.00203928 SOL plus the wrapped balance
Metaplex NFT (burned, not just closed)	several accounts	usually 0.006 to 0.01 SOL

For any other size, the free Solana rent calculator returns the deposit from a byte count using the live network rate.

How do you estimate your total?#

Multiply your empty token accounts by 0.00203928 SOL. The result is precise for plain SPL accounts and slightly low for Token-2022 accounts.

Empty token accounts	Rent locked	After a 5% tool fee	Value at $150/SOL, for illustration
10	0.0204 SOL	0.0194 SOL	about $3
25	0.0510 SOL	0.0484 SOL	about $8
50	0.1020 SOL	0.0969 SOL	about $15
100	0.2039 SOL	0.1937 SOL	about $31
250	0.5098 SOL	0.4843 SOL	about $76
500	1.0196 SOL	0.9687 SOL	about $153

These rows are arithmetic, not survey data. I do not know what is in your wallet, and I would be suspicious of any site that quotes an "average" recovery figure. The dollar column will be out of date by the time you read it; the SOL to USD converter gives the current value.

How do you find out how many empty accounts you have?#

The quickest way is a read-only scan, because wallet apps hide most empty accounts. Phantom and Solflare are built to show what you hold, so a zero-balance token usually drops out of the list while its account stays on chain. Three ways to get the true count:

1. Use a block explorer. Open your address and look at the token accounts view, which lists every account, including zero-balance ones. Count the zeros.
2. Use the command line. spl-token accounts lists the token accounts owned by your keypair, empty ones included.
3. Use a preview scan. Paste your address into the SOLTidy Token Account Closer. It queries both the SPL Token program and Token-2022, and shows the number of closable accounts and the SOL inside them. No wallet connection and no signature are needed for the preview.

As a rough guide to what to expect, the count follows how many distinct tokens you have ever touched, not how long you have held a wallet or how much you have traded by value. A wallet that bought two hundred different memecoins once each has about two hundred accounts. A wallet that traded only SOL and USDC at large size has one or two. Where the accounts come from, swap by swap and mint by mint, is the subject of the hidden cost of everyday Solana activity.

What do network fees take out of the recovered SOL?#

Network fees take very little. The Solana base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, and one close transaction needs one signature. A transaction that closes 8 accounts returns 16,314,240 lamports and pays 5,000, which is about 0.03% of the amount recovered. A small priority fee changes that only slightly, because closing accounts uses very few compute units.

The number of transactions follows from Solana's 1,232-byte transaction size limit. The SOLTidy closer packs up to 8 closes per transaction, so the count of wallet prompts is the number of accounts divided by 8, rounded up:

• 20 accounts: 3 transactions
• 50 accounts: 7 transactions
• 200 accounts: 25 transactions

What does a closing tool cost, and when is it not worth using?#

The SOLTidy Token Account Closer charges 5% of the rent recovered, paid inside the same transaction that returns the SOL. On 50 accounts that is about 0.0051 SOL out of 0.102. If a transaction recovers nothing, no fee is charged.

Whether that is worth it depends on the alternatives, and they are real:

• Wallet menus. Some wallets can close or burn a single token from its menu for the network fee only. With fewer than about five accounts, do that.
• The SPL Token CLI. spl-token close and spl-token gc are free. If you keep a keypair file and are comfortable in a terminal, the CLI is the cheapest path.
• A bulk tool. Reasonable when you use a browser wallet or a hardware wallet, have dozens of accounts, and would rather sign seven prompts than click through fifty menus.

I built SOLTidy because I was the third case many times over; the about page has the longer version. It is not the only way to get your rent back, and the protocol does the actual refunding either way.

What reduces the amount you can recover?#

Anything that stops an account from being empty or closable reduces the total. The common cases:

• Dust balances. An account holding 0.0001 of some token is not empty, and CloseAccount fails on it. If the dust has a market, Sell Dust for SOL swaps it through Jupiter and closes the account in the same transaction, for 1% of the SOL received plus 5% of the rent. If it has no market, burning it is the only way to free the rent, and burning is permanent.
• Frozen accounts. A token whose freeze authority has frozen your account cannot be transferred or burned, so that deposit is stuck unless the account is thawed.
• Token-2022 withheld fees. Accounts for tokens with a transfer fee can hold withheld fees that must be harvested to the mint before the account can close.
• Accounts you still use. Closing the account for a token you buy every week gains nothing, because the next purchase pays the deposit again.

Whether any of this is risky is a separate question, answered in is it safe to close Solana token accounts. Briefly: closing empty accounts is reversible, and burning is not.

Is there more SOL locked elsewhere in the wallet?#

Often, yes: empty token accounts are the most common place SOL gets stranded, but not the only one. Other places to look:

• NFTs you do not want. Burning a standard Metaplex NFT closes its token account, metadata account and master edition, and usually returns between 0.006 and 0.01 SOL, several times what a token account returns. The NFT Burner shows the exact amount per item and charges 5% of the reclaimed SOL. Compressed NFTs hold no rent and return nothing.
• Leftover wrapped SOL. A wSOL account returns its wrapped balance together with its rent when it is closed.
• Old stake accounts. A deactivated stake account holds its entire balance until you withdraw it.
• Developer leftovers. Failed program deploys leave funded buffer accounts behind, and these can hold a lot of SOL because programs are large.

Bottom line#

The amount of SOL you can recover from token accounts is the number of empty accounts multiplied by 0.00203928, slightly more for Token-2022 accounts. Network fees remove a few hundredths of a percent, and a bulk tool's fee, 5% at SOLTidy, is the only other deduction. Count your accounts with a read-only scan before deciding how to close them, and skip the accounts for tokens you still trade. For a handful of accounts use your wallet or the CLI; for dozens or hundreds, batching saves a lot of clicking.