getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption

On Solana, an account must hold a minimum SOL balance proportional to its size to be rent-exempt; below that threshold the runtime can reclaim it. getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption takes a data length in bytes and returns that minimum as a u64 lamport amount (1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 lamports), so you fund a new account with exactly enough SOL to keep it alive permanently. Send it as a JSON-RPC 2.0 POST with positional params to https://solana.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY.

Use cases

• Compute the rent-exempt minimum for a given byte size before you build a createAccount instruction.
• Fund a program-derived address (PDA) with exactly enough lamports to make it rent-exempt as the program initializes it.
• Size up the cost of opening an SPL Token account (165 bytes) or any other fixed-layout account before quoting a fee to the user.

Parameters

Response

Example request

1curl https://solana.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY \
2  -X POST \
3  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
4  -d '{
5  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
6  "id": 1,
7  "method": "getMinimumBalanceForRentExemption",
8  "params": [
9    165,
10    {}
11  ]
12}'

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Pass the exact byte length of the account's data layout. If you underfund, the account is not rent-exempt and can be reclaimed by the runtime when its balance is collected.
• The amount depends on the cluster's rent parameters and can change; read it fresh from the node rather than hardcoding a lamport constant in your client.

Supported networks

• Mainnet
• Devnet

See also

• getAccountInfo
• getBalance