Reclaim Solana rent without closing the account

You can take the surplus rent out of an old Solana token account and keep the account open. An account opened before 3 September 2026 holds 0.00055084 SOL more than Solana now requires. The instruction is called WithdrawExcessLamports, and Raven’s Clean up does not do this.

By the Raven team · Updated 30 October 2026 · 5 min read

What you can get, by opening date

Opened	Holds	Minimum today	Surplus today	Closing it returns
Before 3 Sept 2026	0.00203928 SOL	0.00148844 SOL	0.00055084 SOL	0.00203928 SOL
3 to 11 Sept 2026	0.00185557 SOL	0.00148844 SOL	0.00036713 SOL	0.00185557 SOL
Since 11 Sept 2026	0.00148844 SOL	0.00148844 SOL	None	0.00148844 SOL

For a standard 165 byte token account. Minimum read from Solana mainnet on 30 October 2026, epoch 1072: 1,488,440 lamports. Older amounts from the formula in SIMD-0437.

We checked this against real accounts on 30 October 2026. Of 670 classic token accounts on one long-lived public wallet, 662 held 2,039,280 lamports, 2 held 1,855,569 and 6 held 1,488,440. Those are the three rows above, to the lamport.

At $97.17 a SOL (CoinGecko, same day), the top row’s surplus is about $0.05 per account, or $5.35 across 100 accounts. Small, but it is yours.

Why the surplus exists

Every account has to hold a minimum deposit for its size, called rent. Solana lowered that minimum in two steps in September 2026. Old accounts kept the deposit they were opened with. SIMD-0437, the proposal behind the cut, says existing accounts are unaffected “besides being allowed to reduce the balance to the new minimum”.

So there are now two ways to get SOL back:

	Withdraw surplus	Close the account
What you get	Only what is above today’s minimum	All of it
The account	Stays open	Is gone
The coin balance	Untouched	Must be zero first
Use it for	Coins you are keeping	Coins you are done with

If an account is empty, close it. You get more, and closing is simple. Surplus only matters for accounts you want to keep.

How to withdraw it

The token program has an instruction for this, WithdrawExcessLamports. Its own description says it sends extra SOL from a token program account to another account, “leaving behind only lamports for rent exemption”. The account’s owner signs. Per Chainstack’s guide:

It works on token accounts, mints and multisigs, on both the Token and Token-2022 programs.
It fails on wrapped SOL with “Instruction does not support native tokens”. Close that account instead.
It is cheap. Chainstack’s script fits up to 20 withdrawals in one transaction, for a 5,000 lamport fee. That makes 100 old accounts 5 transactions and 0.000025 SOL in base fees, to get back 0.055 SOL. A priority fee adds a little.

Your options are a tool or a script:

Sol Incinerator says its Fun Mode can withdraw eligible surplus and leave the account open (its blog, 7 October 2026). Its article gives no fee for this, so read the amount before you sign.
Chainstack’s guide has a script you can run yourself.
Stranded Lamports is a lookup that shows the excess on an address you paste.

Any tool builds a transaction for you to sign. It should only move SOL to your own wallet and should touch no coins. If it asks for more, stop. See how wallet drainers work.

Raven does not do this

Raven’s Clean up closes accounts. It sells or burns dust, closes each emptied account and returns all its rent. It does not withdraw surplus from accounts you keep, and there is no such step in Raven’s code or docs as of 30 October 2026. If you want the surplus from coins you hold today, use one of the options above.

Steps 3 to 5 are expected, not live

SIMD-0437 has five steps. Two are live and three are not.

Step	Lamports per byte	Token account minimum	Status on 30 Oct 2026
1	6,333	0.00185557 SOL	Live since slot 444,096,000 (3 Sept)
2	5,080	0.00148844 SOL	Live since slot 446,256,000 (11 Sept)
3	2,575	0.00075448 SOL	Expected
4	1,322	0.00038735 SOL	Expected
5	696	0.00020393 SOL	Expected

Slots read from each step’s feature account on mainnet. Steps 3, 4 and 5 have no feature account on mainnet yet, so they are not active.

Where they stand today:

Anza released Agave v4.4.0 on 28 October 2026, the version the steps are expected with.
Solana Compass (28 October) reports Anza’s targets: general adoption on 2 November and v4.4 feature activation starting 9 November, with “all dates are subject to change”.
The same report says step 3 was still pending testnet, and steps 4 and 5 had no published date.
SIMD-0437 says to move to the next step only if a risk analysis shows it is safe, so any step can stop.

If all five go live, an account opened before September would have 0.00183535 SOL to withdraw, one from early September 0.00165164 SOL, and one opened today 0.00128451 SOL. Those are sums on a plan, not money you can claim yet.

Should you wait?

There is no rush and little penalty either way. Withdrawing now costs almost nothing, and you can do it again after each step. Chainstack notes a rerun finds nothing until the next step goes live, and that waiting until step 5 collects it all in one pass. If a tool takes a cut, compare that with what you would get.

Questions

Does withdrawing surplus close the account?

No. It stops at the current minimum, so the account stays open with its coins. Closing it later returns whatever is left.

Could rent go back up, and would my account be in trouble?

It could. SIMD-0438, which would reset rent to 6,960 lamports per byte, is marked as an idea and is not active on mainnet. SIMD-0392, marked as activated in the proposals repo, says only newly allocated accounts would face a rise, and existing accounts need not top up.

How much SOL is waiting across Solana?

A KuCoin news post estimated up to 612,000 SOL after step 2 and over 3 million SOL after all five. Those are third-party estimates we could not check.

Can I withdraw surplus from a wrapped SOL account?

No. The instruction refuses it. Close the account to get its rent back.

Sources

Raven's Clean up closes empty accounts and returns all their rent; it does not withdraw surplus from accounts you keep.

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