A Solana transaction fee is the amount of SOL charged to process a transaction on the network. It has two parts: a base fee charged per signature, and an optional priority fee the sender can add to be processed sooner. Both are taken from the SOL balance of the account that pays for the transaction.
A Solana transaction is paid for by its fee payer, the first account that signs it, and the fee comes out of that account's SOL balance. The base fee is 5,000 lamports per signature, 0.000005 SOL, and most transactions carry one signature. An optional priority fee can be added on top, priced per compute unit, and the two are charged together and shown by explorers as a single fee figure. A transaction that fails still pays its fee.
Other SOL that leaves a wallet alongside a transaction is not a network fee, and the categories need to stay apart. Rent deposits for new token accounts are SOL you still own and get back when the account is closed. Protocol and marketplace fees, such as a swap fee taken by a decentralised exchange or a royalty on an NFT sale, are charged by the application, usually in the token being traded, and are costs of that trade rather than of the network. Tips paid to bundling services are SOL transfers to a tip account, not fees in the protocol sense, although they serve the same purpose as a priority fee.
Because the base fee is a fraction of a cent, Solana wallets transact far more often than wallets on more expensive chains, and a trading bot can produce tens of thousands of fee-paying transactions in a year, a large share of them failed.
Every fee has two consequences, and both have to be recorded. First, the SOL used to pay it is disposed of. Under Notice 2014-21 SOL is property, so under section 1001 the units spent on the fee produce a gain or loss equal to their value at the time less their basis. Second, the fee is a cost of the transaction it paid for, and transaction costs adjust the tax result of that transaction: costs of acquiring property are added to its basis, and costs of selling property reduce the amount realised.
On a swap of token A for token B, the amount realised on A is the fair market value of B received, and the fee is either added to the basis of B or deducted from the proceeds of A. The fee SOL itself is a separate, small disposal in the same transaction, sourced from the wallet's SOL lots.
On a transfer between your own wallets or a movement into a stake account, nothing is bought or sold, so the fee has no acquisition or sale to attach to. The fee SOL is still disposed of. The cost is either added to the basis of the asset moved or left as a cost that is not deducted, and the same convention should be applied throughout. A failed transaction is the same case with nothing moved at all: the fee is paid, the SOL is disposed of, and there is no asset to carry the cost.
The basis effect of any single fee is invisible. Across a wallet with thousands of transactions it is not, and neither is the count of SOL disposals it produces. The reconciliation of the wallet's SOL balance to the chain is what proves the fees were all carried.
Failed transactions are the fee that goes missing. A wallet that ran a bot through a busy period can have thousands of failed transactions, each of which paid its fee, and many import tools pull only the transactions that succeeded. The fees on the failed ones never leave the report's SOL balance, which then sits above the on-chain balance by their total. When the wallet is later emptied, the report still holds SOL that does not exist, or the shortfall is booked as a loss, a sale or a transfer out that never happened.
Read our Pros and Cons of Solana: The Future of Blockchain or a Temporary Trend? 2026 Update
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