Solana Priority Fee Calculator

Understanding exactly how much your Solana priority fee will cost before sending a transaction helps you balance speed and cost. This page explains the calculation formula and provides a reference table for common scenarios.

Priority Fee Formula

The Solana protocol calculates your prioritization fee using this formula:

Prioritization Fee = ceil(compute_unit_price × compute_unit_limit / 1,000,000) lamports

Where compute_unit_price is in micro-lamports and compute_unit_limit is the requested CU budget. The result is denominated in lamports (1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 lamports).

Priority Fee Reference Table

Dynamic Fee Estimation with getRecentPrioritizationFees

Rather than hardcoding a fee, use the getRecentPrioritizationFees RPC method to fetch real-time fee data from the last 150 blocks. This allows your application to set an optimal fee based on current network conditions:

const connection = new Connection('https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com');
const recentFees = await connection.getRecentPrioritizationFees();

// Get the 75th percentile for a balanced fee
const sorted = recentFees.map(f => f.prioritizationFee).sort((a, b) => a - b);
const p75Index = Math.floor(sorted.length * 0.75);
const recommendedFee = sorted[p75Index];
console.log(`Recommended priority fee: ${recommendedFee} microlamports/CU`);

Full Cost Breakdown Example

For a typical token transfer transaction with 1 signature, 200,000 CUs requested, and a medium priority fee of 10,000 microlamports/CU:

• Base fee: 5,000 lamports (fixed per signature)
• Priority fee: ceil(10,000 × 200,000 / 1,000,000) = 2,000 lamports
• Total transaction fee: 7,000 lamports = 0.000007 SOL
• At $150/SOL: approximately $0.00105 USD total