How to Airdrop Tokens on Solana: Snapshot, List and Costs

The short answer#

To airdrop tokens on Solana you decide who qualifies, take a snapshot of those wallets, clean the list, set an amount per wallet, and send the tokens in batches of about 9 transfers per transaction. The cost is dominated by rent rather than fees: every recipient who has never held your token needs a token account, and you, the sender, fund it with about 0.00204 SOL. Budget for that before anything else.

What are the steps to airdrop tokens on Solana?#

The steps are the same whatever tooling you use, and only the last one touches your wallet.

1. Define eligibility: which holders, of which mint, above what balance, as of when.
2. Take a holder snapshot of the relevant token or collection.
3. Clean the list: remove pools, exchanges, burn addresses, program-owned addresses and duplicates.
4. Decide amounts: one equal amount, or pro-rata to each wallet's balance.
5. Calculate the cost and fund the sending wallet with the tokens plus enough SOL for rent and fees.
6. Send in batches, record every signature, and retry only the transfers that verifiably did not land.
7. Publish the list and the results so the community can check them.

If the token does not exist yet, start with how to launch a Solana token; an airdrop comes after the mint, the metadata and the authority decisions.

How do you decide who is eligible?#

Eligibility is a rule that can be checked from on-chain data at a specific moment. "Everyone holding at least 10,000 of token X at the snapshot" is a usable rule. "Our real supporters" is not. Write down the mint address, the minimum balance, any excluded addresses and the snapshot time before you take the snapshot. Deciding after you have seen the list invites accusations of favouritism.

What is a holder snapshot and how do you take one?#

A holder snapshot is a list of every wallet holding a given mint, with each wallet's balance, captured at one moment. Solana does not store a holder list anywhere. Balances live in token accounts, each one a separate account recording a mint, an owner wallet and an amount. A snapshot reads every token account for the mint and builds the list from them.

Why a snapshot should aggregate by owner#

One wallet can hold the same token in more than one token account. If you airdrop per token account, that wallet is paid twice and your holder count is inflated. A correct snapshot sums balances per owner wallet and drops accounts with a zero balance.

Excluding pools, exchanges and burn addresses#

The owner of a token account is not always a person. The largest holder of most traded tokens is a liquidity pool authority on Raydium, Orca or Meteora. Centralised exchanges hold customer balances in a few hot wallets. Burned supply may sit in an incinerator address, and team or vesting allocations sit in lock contracts. Tokens airdropped to a pool or a burn address are wasted, and tokens sent to an exchange hot wallet go to the exchange, not to its customers.

The free Holder Snapshot tool does this without a wallet connection. You paste the mint address, it detects whether the mint belongs to the SPL Token program or Token-2022, reads every token account, sums balances per owner and drops empty accounts. You can then set a minimum balance, keep only the top N holders and paste in addresses to exclude, and export the result as CSV, JSON or an addresses-only TXT file. Its limit is size: it runs in your browser against a standard RPC method, which works for mints with up to a few hundred thousand token accounts. For mints with millions of accounts, RPC nodes reject the request, and you need an indexer or a data provider's bulk export instead.

Cleaning the list and setting amounts#

Cleaning the list means removing every address that should not or cannot usefully receive tokens. Beyond pools, exchanges and burn addresses, check for:

• Duplicates, which appear when lists from several sources are merged.
• Off-curve addresses. These are program-derived addresses with no private key, such as vaults. Tokens sent to them are only recoverable if the owning program supports it.
• Your own team and treasury wallets, unless the rule says they are included.
• Dust holders below your minimum, who would cost more in rent than the airdrop is worth.

Then choose the amount model. An equal airdrop gives every eligible wallet the same amount. It is simple to explain and rewards the number of holders, which also makes it the easiest to game by splitting one holding across many wallets. A pro-rata airdrop gives each wallet a share proportional to its snapshot balance. It is resistant to wallet splitting, but it sends most of the distribution to the largest holders. A minimum balance plus pro-rata, or pro-rata with a cap, are common compromises.

In the Holder Snapshot tool, the "Send to these holders" button passes the filtered list to the multisender in the same tab. If you enter a total, it is split pro-rata and each share is rounded down to the token's decimals, so the distribution can never exceed the total.

How much does a Solana airdrop cost?#

A Solana airdrop costs rent plus network fees plus any tool fee, and rent is by far the largest part when recipients are new to the token. There are three components.

• Rent: each recipient without a token account for your mint needs an associated token account, funded by the sender with 0.00203928 SOL. Token-2022 mints with extensions can need slightly more. The rent calculator gives the figure for any account size.
• Network fees: 0.000005 SOL per transaction, plus an optional priority fee. With about 9 token transfers per transaction, this is tiny.
• Tool fee: the SOLTidy multisender charges 0.0005 SOL per recipient, paid inside each transaction. A script you write yourself has no tool fee.

The table assumes an SPL token, 9 recipients per transaction, no priority fee, and the multisender fee.

Recipients	Transactions	Network fees	Multisender fee	ATA rent if all are new	Total, all new holders	Total, all already hold the token
100	12	0.00006 SOL	0.05 SOL	0.204 SOL	about 0.254 SOL	about 0.050 SOL
1,000	112	0.00056 SOL	0.5 SOL	2.039 SOL	about 2.540 SOL	about 0.501 SOL
10,000	1,112	0.00556 SOL	5 SOL	20.393 SOL	about 25.398 SOL	about 5.006 SOL

The last two columns are the point. If you airdrop more of token X to existing holders of token X, they already have token accounts and you pay no rent. If you airdrop a new token Y to holders of token X, every recipient needs a new account and you pay rent for all of them. The rent is not lost to the network; it sits in the recipient's token account and returns to the recipient, not to you, if they close it. The mechanics are in Solana transaction fees explained.

In congestion, add a priority fee per transaction. The Priority Fee tracker shows current levels, and even a generous priority fee across 1,112 transactions is small next to 20 SOL of rent.

How do you send a Solana airdrop in batches?#

A Solana airdrop is sent as a series of independent transactions, each carrying as many transfers as fit. About 20 SOL transfers or about 9 token transfers fit in one Solana transaction. The cap comes from the 1,232-byte maximum transaction size. A plain SOL transfer adds one instruction and one 32-byte address per recipient. A token transfer adds two instructions per recipient, one to create the associated token account if it is missing and one to transfer, plus two addresses: the recipient's wallet and their token account.

An airdrop to 10,000 wallets is therefore more than a thousand separate transactions. The multisender asks your wallet to sign them in groups of up to 12 with a single approval, broadcasts and confirms that group, then moves to the next. It is non-custodial: every transfer goes straight from your token account to the recipient's, and the first batch is simulated before any signature is requested.

How do you handle failures without paying anyone twice?#

You avoid double payment by never resending a transfer until its original transaction has definitely landed or definitely expired. On a busy network some transactions will not confirm before their blockhash expires, roughly 60 to 90 seconds after signing. A confirmation timeout in the interface does not prove the transaction missed; it may still land a few seconds later. Resending immediately is how recipients get paid twice.

The safe procedure is to record the signature of every transaction against the recipients inside it, look up each unconfirmed signature on chain at the end of the run, and rebuild transactions only for recipients whose transaction verifiably failed or expired. The multisender works this way: its Retry failed option includes only unpaid recipients, makes you wait while any transaction is still unresolved, and produces a CSV report with address, amount, status and signature for every line. If you script your own airdrop, build the same ledger first. The common causes of failed sends are covered in why Solana transactions fail.

When is a compressed airdrop the better choice?#

A compressed airdrop is the better choice at very large scale, where rent for ordinary token accounts would cost more than the airdrop is worth. Compressed tokens use Solana's state compression: balances are stored as hashes in a shared Merkle tree rather than in one rent-funded account per recipient, so the per-recipient cost falls to a small fraction of 0.00204 SOL.

The trade-offs are real. Recipients generally have to claim or decompress the tokens into a normal token account before they can trade them, which costs them the rent instead. Wallet and exchange support is narrower than for ordinary SPL tokens, and the tooling depends on specialised RPC providers. SOLTidy does not do compressed airdrops; the multisender sends ordinary SPL and Token-2022 transfers. For a few hundred to a few thousand recipients, ordinary transfers are simpler and the tokens arrive ready to use.

Spam and legal courtesy#

Unsolicited tokens are the delivery route for most Solana scam links, so recipients and wallets are suspicious of them by default. Airdrop to people who expect it, never put a URL in the token name, announce the airdrop from your official channels before sending, and publish the snapshot rule and the recipient list. Distributing tokens can also carry legal and tax consequences depending on the jurisdictions involved. I am a trader who builds tools, not a lawyer (see the about page), so take professional advice for anything sizeable.

Bottom line#

A Solana airdrop is mostly list work: a clear eligibility rule, a snapshot aggregated by owner, and the removal of pools, exchanges and burn addresses. The bill is mostly rent, about 0.00204 SOL for each recipient who has never held the token, so check how many of your recipients are new before you fund the wallet. Send in batches, keep a signature ledger, and resend only after confirming on chain that a transfer did not land. Above tens of thousands of new recipients, look at compressed distribution instead.