Explore & calculate
Live Solana priority fees, in micro-lamports and dollars
See what it currently costs to get a transaction into a Solana block: live priority fees from recent slots, four suggested tiers, and the total in SOL and USD. Free, read-only and non-custodial — no wallet needed.
How it works
- 1
Watch the live fee market
The tracker samples the most recent 150 slots (about one minute) every 10 seconds and shows the minimum, median, 75th and 90th percentile and maximum fee. Polling pauses while the tab is hidden.
- 2
Pick a tier
Low, Medium, High and Turbo are the 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile of slots that charged a fee. The table shows what each tier costs for a transfer, a token transfer, a swap and an NFT mint.
- 3
Narrow it to your accounts
Paste the pool, market or token accounts your transaction writes to (up to 128) to see the fee market for those accounts only, which is what decides whether you land.
- 4
Copy the snippet
Copy a ready-made ComputeBudgetProgram.setComputeUnitPrice call with the selected tier's micro-lamport value and add it to your transaction.
What is a priority fee on Solana?
Every Solana transaction pays a fixed base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature — 0.000005 SOL for an ordinary single-signer transaction. A priority fee is an optional extra payment on top. When more transactions want to write to the same accounts than a block can fit, the validator's scheduler orders the competing transactions by how much they pay per unit of computation, and the highest bidders go first.
The bid is expressed as a compute unit price in micro-lamports, where one lamport is one million micro-lamports and one SOL is one billion lamports. You set it with the Compute Budget program's SetComputeUnitPrice instruction, normally together with SetComputeUnitLimit. Since early 2025 the whole priority fee goes to the validator that produces the block, while half of the base fee is burned and half goes to the validator.
How the priority fee is calculated
Priority fee in lamports equals the compute unit price in micro-lamports, multiplied by the compute unit limit, divided by one million and rounded up. The important detail is that the multiplier is the limit you request, not the units your transaction ends up using. If you do not set a limit, the default is 200,000 units per instruction, capped at 1,400,000 per transaction, and you pay for all of it.
A worked example: a swap that requests 250,000 compute units at 20,000 micro-lamports pays 250,000 × 20,000 ÷ 1,000,000 = 5,000 lamports of priority fee, plus the 5,000 lamport base fee, for 0.00001 SOL in total. The same price on a plain SOL transfer, which needs about 450 units including the two budget instructions, adds just 9 lamports. That is why the cheapest way to cut fees is to simulate the transaction and request a limit slightly above what it consumes.
Why the network-wide number is often zero — local fee markets
Solana does not have a single gas price. Transactions declare in advance which accounts they will write to, and two transactions only compete if they write to the same account. The result is a separate fee market for every hot account. A popular token's liquidity pool during a launch can require millions of micro-lamports, while at the same moment a transfer between two quiet wallets lands with no priority fee at all.
The getRecentPrioritizationFees RPC method reflects this. Called without arguments it returns, for each recent slot, the lowest fee that made it into the block — which is frequently zero, because most blocks contain at least one cheap transaction. Called with a list of writable accounts, it returns the lowest fee among transactions that locked those accounts. That second number is the useful one, so the tracker lets you enter the accounts you care about and recomputes every statistic for them.
How much priority fee should I pay?
For everyday transfers and quiet tokens, the Low or Medium tier is normally enough, and at those levels the priority fee is a fraction of a cent. Use High when the accounts you touch are visibly busy, and Turbo when the cost of missing a block is real: a contested mint, a liquidation, or a swap in a fast-moving market where a minute's delay matters more than a few thousand lamports.
Because a per-slot sample only records the minimum fee that landed, percentiles of those minimums are a floor, not a guarantee. The tracker therefore applies sensible minimums to each tier when the sampled market is idle, and, when the RPC provider offers its own estimator, shows that as a second opinion. If transactions still expire, the usual causes are a stale blockhash, a failing simulation or an overloaded RPC, none of which a higher fee fixes.
Adding a priority fee in code
With @solana/web3.js, prepend two instructions to the transaction: ComputeBudgetProgram.setComputeUnitLimit with the unit limit, and ComputeBudgetProgram.setComputeUnitPrice with microLamports set to the tier value. Order relative to your other instructions does not matter, but each may appear only once. Many wallets add a priority fee of their own to transactions that arrive without one, so dApp developers who set both instructions explicitly keep control over what their users pay.
To choose the limit, run simulateTransaction first, read unitsConsumed from the response and add a margin of ten to twenty percent. A limit that is too low fails the transaction with a compute budget exceeded error, and the fee is still charged. The transaction decoder shows both values for any past transaction, which is a quick way to check what a wallet or bot actually paid.
Questions & answers
What is the current Solana priority fee?
It changes every slot and depends on which accounts you write to, so there is no single figure. The panel above shows live percentiles over the last 150 slots — roughly the past minute — refreshed every 10 seconds. For transfers between ordinary wallets the required fee is often zero. For busy pools, enter the pool address in the accounts box to see the fee market that applies to you.
How much does a Solana transaction cost with a priority fee?
The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature. The priority fee is the compute unit price times the compute unit limit, divided by one million. At 10,000 micro-lamports, a token transfer of about 6,500 units adds 65 lamports and a 250,000-unit swap adds 2,500 lamports. The table in the tool converts the selected tier into SOL and USD for four typical transactions.
Is the priority fee tracker free, and does it need my wallet?
It is free and needs no wallet. The tracker only calls read-only RPC methods and a price feed for the USD conversion. It never builds, signs or sends a transaction, so there is nothing for it to charge a fee on and no permission for it to ask for. You can leave it open in a tab while you work; it stops polling when the tab is hidden.
What is a micro-lamport?
A micro-lamport is one millionth of a lamport, and a lamport is one billionth of a SOL. The unit exists only for pricing compute: fees are quoted per compute unit, and a whole lamport per unit would be far too coarse. The final priority fee is always rounded up to a whole number of lamports, since lamports are the smallest amount an account can actually hold.
Why is my Solana transaction not confirming even with a priority fee?
A fee only helps a valid transaction that reaches the block producer. Check that the blockhash is fresh, since transactions expire after about 150 blocks; that simulation succeeds; and that your RPC is forwarding it and retrying. Also compare your price with the fee market for the specific accounts you write to — a bid that looks high network-wide can be far below what a hot pool demands.
Do I get the priority fee back if the transaction fails?
No. If the transaction is included in a block, the full fee is charged whether execution succeeds or fails, and it is charged on the compute unit limit you requested rather than the units used. You pay nothing only when the transaction never lands, for example because it expired. Setting a realistic compute unit limit is the main way to avoid overpaying.
Where does the fee data come from?
From the getRecentPrioritizationFees RPC method, which returns the minimum prioritization fee that landed in each of the last 150 slots, optionally restricted to transactions that write-locked the accounts you list. The statistics and tiers are computed from that in your browser. When the RPC provider exposes its own fee estimator, its figures are shown alongside as a second opinion.
Is this tool free?
The Priority Fee Tracker is free. It reads recent fee data from Solana mainnet, needs no wallet, and never sends a transaction.
Guides that go deeper
Built and maintained by Jacob, a Solana trader who uses these tools daily. Content reviewed . Every transaction is built in your browser and signed in your own wallet — see the terms for fees.