G GOPNIK ACADEMY
Solana 101 — Initiate · Lesson 3 of 5

Priority fees and the compute budget

4 min · read

Back to course

Solana's base transaction fee is 5,000 lamports — fixed, paid to the validator regardless of what your transaction does. That's ~$0.0007 in 2026 prices. But the base fee is not what gets your transaction included quickly.

The compute auction

Solana has a global compute-unit (CU) budget per block. Every instruction consumes some CUs (the System Program transfer uses ~150 CUs; an SPL transfer uses ~2,500 CUs). Each block has a budget of ~48 million CUs, so the cluster can process a lot of work — but during busy moments, transactions compete.

The cluster orders transactions in two stages:

  1. Priority (set by you): how many micro-lamports per CU you're willing to pay, on top of the base 5,000 lamports
  2. Arrival order: when ties exist on priority, earlier transactions go first

If you set your priority fee to zero, your transaction joins the back of the queue and gets included whenever the cluster has spare capacity. During normal load that's a few seconds. During congestion (a popular token launch, a market crash) it can be many minutes — or never, if the leader skips you.

How the wallet picks

The wallet samples the last ~150 priority-fee values from the network (the getRecentPrioritizationFees RPC) and picks the 75th percentile. This means:

  • During quiet periods, the fee floor (1,000 microlamports/CU, ~$0.00002) wins
  • During busy periods, the wallet pays roughly what other successful senders are paying
  • The fee is clamped at a hard cap of 0.001 SOL per tx (~$0.15 in 2026 prices)

If you'd rather pay nothing during congestion and wait, the wallet's Advanced expander on the send form lets you override the floor downward. We don't expose the cap upward — paying more than $0.15 per tx is almost never the right move and we'd rather you switch networks.

What goes wrong

Three failure modes you'll see if priority fees aren't right:

  • "Transaction not yet confirmed" stuck for >30 s. The wallet retries with a slightly higher fee; if it's still stuck, you'll see a banner.
  • "Insufficient funds for transaction" with €0 of asset moving. The base fee + priority fee + ATA-create rent exceeds your SOL balance. The wallet rejects before broadcast and surfaces the specific shortfall.
  • The leader "skipped" your transaction. Rare in 2026; usually means cluster outage. The wallet auto-resubmits up to 3 times before failing.

What you commit to

  • The wallet picks a sensible priority fee for you; you don't need to think about it
  • The cap of 0.001 SOL prevents runaway costs; you cannot bypass it
  • A consistently stuck transaction during congestion means you should wait, not retry-with-higher-fee
  • Solana fees are dynamic; €0 transactions during quiet periods, ~€0.005 during congestion

The next lesson covers compressed NFTs — the wallet's NFT story on Solana.