For Solana's entire history, opening a token account meant locking up 0.00203928 SOL. That number is finally changing. In September 2026 the network began rolling out SIMD-0437, a proposal that cuts the rent rate by 90% over five steps. Two of those steps are already live.
This matters to anyone with a cluttered wallet, because it changes how much each empty account is worth, and it creates a new kind of locked SOL that did not exist before. Here is what is actually happening, in plain terms.
What rent is
Solana charges for the storage an account takes up. Rather than billing you over time, the network requires each account to hold a minimum balance, called the rent-exempt minimum, for as long as it exists. Close the account and the balance comes back. For a standard 165-byte token account the minimum was set at launch and never moved: 2,039,280 lamports, or 0.00203928 SOL.
If you want the long version, see how rent works on Solana.
What SIMD-0437 changes
The rate behind that minimum was 6,960 lamports per byte. SIMD-0437 lowers it to 696 lamports per byte, but gradually, so that applications have time to adjust. Each step is its own feature gate on mainnet.
| Step | Lamports per byte | Token account minimum | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Before | 6,960 | 0.00203928 SOL | Legacy |
| 1 | 6,333 | 0.00185 SOL | Live since Sept 3, 2026 |
| 2 | 5,080 | 0.00148844 SOL | Live since Sept 11, 2026 |
| 3 | 2,575 | 0.00075 SOL | Expected Nov 2026 |
| 4 | 1,322 | 0.00039 SOL | Expected Nov 2026 |
| 5 | 696 | 0.00020393 SOL | Expected Nov 2026 |
Steps 3 through 5 are tied to a later validator release and the dates can slip, but the direction is set. By the end of the rollout a new token account will lock about a tenth of what it does today.
Your old accounts keep their old deposit
This is the part most people miss. The reduction changes the minimum required for an account; it does not reach into existing accounts and take money out. An account you opened in 2024 still holds 0.00203928 SOL. A token account opened last week holds 0.00148844 SOL. Both are "rent exempt." They just have different amounts sitting in them.
That means a wallet full of old empty accounts is worth exactly what it was worth before. Closing them returns the full legacy deposit.
The new thing: excess rent
Because old accounts hold more than the new minimum, the difference is now surplus. An old account holds 0.00203928 SOL but only needs 0.00148844 SOL to stay open, leaving about 0.00055 SOL of excess per account today. After step 5 that excess grows to about 0.00184 SOL per account.
The token programs expose an instruction that lets the account owner withdraw that surplus without closing the account or touching the tokens inside it. In practice this means accounts you still use, holding tokens you want to keep, now have reclaimable SOL in them too. That was never true before.
Wick Sweep closes empty accounts and returns their full deposit. Surplus withdrawal from accounts that still hold tokens is a different operation, and we will say so clearly if and when we support it rather than quietly bundling it in. For now, the SOL in your active accounts stays where it is until you close them.
What this means for cleaning
Old empty accounts are unaffected. Each one still returns about 0.002 SOL. If you have been putting off a cleanup, nothing about this reduces what you get.
New empty accounts are worth less. An account opened and emptied this month returns about 0.0015 SOL, and that figure keeps falling through the remaining steps. Wick Sweep reads the real balance of every account rather than assuming 0.002, so the estimate you see is accurate and the fee is a percentage of the real amount.
Percentage fees scale down automatically. A 4% fee on a 0.0002 SOL account is 0.000008 SOL. Flat per-account fees do not scale the same way, which is worth knowing when you compare tools after the final step lands.
Cleanup tools matter less per account and more in aggregate. The individual numbers get smaller, but trading habits do not change, so the account count keeps growing. The maths of "a few hundred accounts times a small number" still comes out to real SOL.
Should you clean now or wait?
Now. There is no scenario in which waiting increases what an empty account returns. Legacy accounts return the same amount whenever you close them, and new accounts only get cheaper. The only reason to wait is if you expect to reuse the same token soon, since reopening an account costs the current minimum, and even that is a small number.
If you are not sure how many empty accounts you have, the scan is free and does not require signing anything. For the mechanics of closing them, see how to close empty token accounts.
See what your old accounts are still holding. Scan free with Wick Sweep →