CashboardGlossary · Solana
What are solana priority fees?
A Solana priority fee is an optional extra, priced in micro-lamports per compute unit, that moves a transaction up the queue when blocks are busy.
How do solana priority fees work?
Every Solana transaction pays a base fee of 5,000 lamports per signature. The priority fee sits on top. You set a compute unit price in micro-lamports, and the fee is that price times the compute unit limit you request. When blocks are contested, the leader's scheduler takes the transactions that pay more per unit of compute first.
Since SIMD-0096 went live in February 2025, the whole priority fee goes to the validator that produced the block. Half of the base fee is still burned. Jito tips are a separate payment, and many trading bots send both.
Contention is often local. If everyone is hammering one pool, only the transactions that write to that pool's accounts fight each other. So fees can spike for one hot market while a plain SOL transfer lands next to it for almost nothing.
Say a swap requests 200,000 compute units at 10,000 micro-lamports per unit. That is 2 billion micro-lamports, or 2,000 lamports, or 0.000002 SOL. During a hot launch the price that actually lands can jump by orders of magnitude for a few minutes and then fall back. And the fee is charged on the limit you request, so units the transaction never uses still get billed.
Also called: priority fee, compute unit price.
Where do solana priority fees show up in Cashboard?
Chain status shows one network-wide median priority fee (the median of the lowest fee that landed in each recent slot), next to block height, block age and RPC latency, refreshed every 15 seconds. It does not tell you what one hot pool costs. Solana pulse goes further: median, 75th and 95th percentile fee tiers from recent slots, what a 200,000 CU transaction would cost at each tier, a calm, busy or congested reading, and the Jito tip floor.
Frequently asked questions
Are Solana priority fees required?
No. Only the 5,000-lamport base fee is required. On a quiet network a transaction with no priority fee usually lands fine. During congestion it tends to sit and expire while paying transactions go first.
Where can you read more about solana priority fees?
Related terms
Last reviewed . Market data in Cashboard comes from the providers named on each widget and may be delayed. Nothing here is financial advice.