The state where an account holds enough lamports to cover two years of rent, making it effectively permanent. The minimum balance is approximately 0.00089088 SOL per byte of data. Since Solana requires all new accounts to be rent-exempt, this is the minimum funding required when creating accounts.
Start with the shortest useful explanation before going deeper.
The state where an account holds enough lamports to cover two years of rent, making it effectively permanent. The minimum balance is approximately 0.00089088 SOL per byte of data. Since Solana requires all new accounts to be rent-exempt, this is the minimum funding required when creating accounts.
Use the quick analogy first so the term is easier to reason about when you meet it in code, docs, or prompts.
Think of it as one of the core moving pieces your program reads, writes, or invokes at runtime.
Place the term inside its Solana layer so the definition is easier to reason about.
Accounts, instructions, PDAs, transactions, and execution flow.
Turn the term from vocabulary into something operational for product and engineering work.
This term unlocks adjacent concepts quickly, so it works best when you treat it as a junction instead of an isolated definition.
Use this compact block when you want to give an agent or assistant grounded context without dumping the entire page.
Rent Exemption (rent-exemption) Category: Programming Model Definition: The state where an account holds enough lamports to cover two years of rent, making it effectively permanent. The minimum balance is approximately 0.00089088 SOL per byte of data. Since Solana requires all new accounts to be rent-exempt, this is the minimum funding required when creating accounts. Related: Rent, Account
Use glossary context, relationships, mental models, and builder paths to get structured answers instead of generic chat output.
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These branches show which concepts this term touches directly and what sits one layer beyond them.
A fee mechanism that charges accounts for storing data on-chain. Accounts must maintain a minimum lamport balance proportional to their data size (~6.96 SOL per MB) to be rent-exempt. Since 2022, all new accounts must be rent-exempt at creation. Accounts falling below the threshold are removed during rent collection.
The fundamental data storage unit on Solana. Every piece of state is stored in an account identified by a 32-byte public key. Accounts hold a lamport balance, an owner program, a data byte array (up to 10MB), and an executable flag. Only the owning program can modify an account's data, but anyone can credit lamports to it.
These are the next concepts worth opening if you want this term to make more sense inside a real Solana workflow.
These entries are easy to mix up when you are reading quickly, prompting an LLM, or onboarding into a new layer of Solana.
A fee mechanism that charges accounts for storing data on-chain. Accounts must maintain a minimum lamport balance proportional to their data size (~6.96 SOL per MB) to be rent-exempt. Since 2022, all new accounts must be rent-exempt at creation. Accounts falling below the threshold are removed during rent collection.
Glossary entries become useful when they are connected. These links are the shortest path to adjacent ideas.
A fee mechanism that charges accounts for storing data on-chain. Accounts must maintain a minimum lamport balance proportional to their data size (~6.96 SOL per MB) to be rent-exempt. Since 2022, all new accounts must be rent-exempt at creation. Accounts falling below the threshold are removed during rent collection.
The fundamental data storage unit on Solana. Every piece of state is stored in an account identified by a 32-byte public key. Accounts hold a lamport balance, an owner program, a data byte array (up to 10MB), and an executable flag. Only the owning program can modify an account's data, but anyone can credit lamports to it.
These entries live beside the current term and help the page feel like part of a larger knowledge graph instead of a dead end.
The fundamental data storage unit on Solana. Every piece of state is stored in an account identified by a 32-byte public key. Accounts hold a lamport balance, an owner program, a data byte array (up to 10MB), and an executable flag. Only the owning program can modify an account's data, but anyone can credit lamports to it.
Executable code deployed on-chain, equivalent to a smart contract on other blockchains. Programs are stateless—they store no data themselves but read/write data in separate accounts they own. Programs are compiled to SBF bytecode and loaded via the BPF Loader. Every program has a unique Program ID (its account's public key).
A single operation within a transaction that invokes a program. An instruction specifies: (1) the program ID to call, (2) an array of account metas (pubkey, is_signer, is_writable), and (3) an opaque data byte array. Programs decode the instruction data to determine which operation to perform.
An atomic unit of execution containing one or more instructions, a recent blockhash, and one or more signatures. All instructions in a transaction execute sequentially and atomically—if any instruction fails, the entire transaction reverts. Transactions have a 1,232-byte size limit (matching IPv6 MTU) and a default 200,000 CU budget.