After the Rent Cut, Your Nonce, Stake and Vote Accounts Are Over-Funded

The rent-cut post explained the economics: Solana is cutting the price of account storage by 90% in five feature-gated steps, and accounts funded at the old price keep every lamport they were funded with. The follow-up question arrived within a day of publishing it: if my account holds more rent than it now needs, can I get the difference back without closing it?

For four kinds of account, yes. Here is the arithmetic per type, the instruction that withdraws it, the switch that could put the price back up, and a detail from last week that will trip anyone tracking this by feature ID.

The Formula, and Where the Ladder Stands

Rent on Solana is now a single multiplication: (128 + data length) × lamports per byte. The 128 is a fixed per-account overhead; the two-year multiplier that used to complicate this was folded into the byte price earlier this year.

The byte price is stepping down through five gates:

Three steps remain, expected with Agave 4.4. At the end, the surplus is nine-tenths of what was originally deposited.

Four Account Types, Four Numbers

Per account, today against the original price, and at the last step:

Individually small. Multiplied by the number of accounts a wallet, a treasury or a validator operator controls, not small. A validator with a hundred nonce accounts for a signing pipeline, a distribution program that created ten thousand stake accounts, a market maker with a thousand token accounts: the surplus is a line item, and it grows at every step.

The Instruction Per Type, and Who Can Sign It

Each program guards its own accounts, so the withdrawal is four different instructions with one rule in common: the account keeps at least the current rent-exempt minimum, and the signer is the account's own authority.

• Nonce accounts: WithdrawNonceAccount, signed by the nonce authority, any amount above the rent-exempt minimum.
• Stake accounts: the stake program's Withdraw, signed by the withdraw authority. On a delegated account only the portion above the delegated stake plus the reserve is withdrawable; on a deactivated one, anything above the reserve.
• Vote accounts: the vote program's Withdraw, signed by the authorized withdrawer, keeping the rent-exempt minimum plus pending delegator rewards — the delegators' accrued share is in the balance but is not the operator's to take. Once Alpenglow activates — the gate had not activated on mainnet as of 17 September 2026 — the account also has to keep one epoch's admission ticket: 1.2 SOL at today's 300 ms slots, 1.0 SOL from epoch 1037, when slots go to 250 ms.
• Token accounts: WithdrawExcessLamports, signed by the account's owner, an instruction both token programs carry precisely for this case. The account stays open and usable.

Nothing above closes anything, and nothing requires a third party to hold a key. The live tool on the app builds the batch for the accounts a connected wallet controls, and the wallet signs it.

The Switch That Can Put the Price Back Up

The ladder has a reverse gear. A feature named set_lamports_per_byte_to_6960 restores the original price. It had not activated on mainnet as of 17 September 2026, and the validator's ordering rule gives it priority: if a rollback and a cut activate in the same epoch, the rollback wins.

The ordering rule for the cuts themselves is also worth knowing: if several cut gates activate in one epoch, the lowest price wins; if they activate out of order, the most recently activated price wins. The ladder is designed to descend, but the code allows for the messier cases.

For anyone timing account creation to a cheaper step, the rollback is the risk. A batch deferred to "after the next cut" can land after a rollback instead. Watch both directions.

The IDs Changed Recently

Feature gates are identified by public keys, and those keys are not stable until a feature activates. On 11 September 2026 the SIMD-0438 rollback gate and the remaining SIMD-0437 cut gates were re-keyed — assigned new feature IDs — in the validator source. Any dashboard, script or bookmark that tracked the old IDs is now watching accounts that will never activate.

This is normal for unactivated features, and it is the reason the tracker on this site reads the feature names from the current validator build rather than from a list someone typed in months ago. If you track gates yourself, re-read the IDs from the release you are running, every release.

Rent Surplus: Questions People Actually Ask

What to Do, in Order

• List the nonce, stake, vote and token accounts your keys control, with their creation-era balances.
• Withdraw the surplus on the ones you keep, with the instruction for that type, leaving the current minimum and, for vote accounts, the delegators' share.
• Close the ones you do not need at all; closing returns the full original deposit, which is the larger number.
• Then wait for the next step and do it again. Three steps remain, and each one makes every account you funded at the old price a little more over-funded than it was.

While you are auditing stake accounts, the minimum delegation has been 1 SOL since 18 June 2026 — the same accounts. A sub-1-SOL delegation still earns, but it can no longer be split or moved, only merged, deactivated or withdrawn.

Rules and ordering read from the Agave validator source at commit beee69b958: runtime/src/bank.rs, feature-set/src/lib.rs and the rent collector. The figures assume the 5,080 lamports-per-byte rate live on mainnet on 17 September 2026 — re-check the live rate and the live step before acting on a number here.