getBalance

getBalance returns the native SOL balance of a single Solana account, given its base-58 address. The amount comes back in lamports, Solana's smallest unit, where 1 SOL equals 1,000,000,000 lamports. It is the lightest way to check how much SOL a wallet or program account holds without pulling its full data. Call it as a JSON-RPC 2.0 POST with positional params against https://solana.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY, and add a commitment of processed, confirmed, or finalized in the optional config to control how settled the read is.

Use cases

• Show a live SOL balance for a connected wallet (for example a Phantom address) in a UI or dashboard.
• Poll a deposit address with commitment: "confirmed" to detect incoming SOL before crediting a user.
• Check an account holds enough lamports to stay rent-exempt and cover fees before you build and send a transfer.

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": "getBalance",
8  "params": [
9    "9WzDXwBbmkg8ZTbNMqUxvQRAyrZzDsGYdLVL9zYtAWWM",
10    {}
11  ]
12}'

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• The value is in lamports, not SOL — divide by 1,000,000,000 to display SOL, and keep big-integer precision so large balances do not lose accuracy in 64-bit floats.
• The response is wrapped in { context, value }; read result.value for the lamport amount, not the bare result object.

Supported networks

• Mainnet
• Devnet

See also

• getAccountInfo
• getMultipleAccounts
• getTokenAccountBalance