How much does one Solana validator earn?
Income follows stake. Commission is a share of what the delegated stake earns, and a validator with more stake leads more slots, so it also collects more block fees. The bottom tenth of validators keep under 253 SOL a year and the top tenth more than 20,320. Those with over a million SOL delegated take 91% of all operator income, so an average across the network says little about a typical node. The table splits validators by delegated stake.
| Delegated stake | Validators | Kept per year | After VAT | Cover VAT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| under 50k SOL | 54 | 112 | -158 | 11 of 54 |
| 50k–100k SOL | 113 | 399 | 129 | 93 of 113 |
| 100k–250k SOL | 253 | 723 | 453 | 247 of 253 |
| 250k–1M SOL | 131 | 2,010 | 1,740 | 130 of 131 |
| over 1M SOL | 105 | 32,710 | 32,440 | 105 of 105 |
Medians per band in SOL a year, over the 656 validators active in every epoch from 1067 to 1076. Kept is commission on inflation and MEV plus fees from the validator's own blocks, net of what it passes to delegators. After VAT subtracts the 0.8 SOL ticket of each epoch and adds any Foundation reimbursement. A year is 337 epochs at the current epoch length.
Does running a Solana validator pay?
Since epoch 1064 votes are free, and the cost the chain charges is the validator admission ticket (VAT): 0.8 SOL an epoch, burned from the vote account, about 270 SOL a year, around $25,000 at today's price. 586 of the 656 validators earn more than that, and below 50,000 SOL of delegated stake most do not. Servers and bandwidth come on top and are not published per operator, so the validator profit calculator takes your own figures.
How much do Solana validators earn in total?
Over the past week, validators collected roughly 4,482 SOL a day in transaction fees, 1,639 SOL in issuance commission and 126 SOL in Jito commission — network-wide, before hardware costs and the VAT. Since August 2023 the running total is 10.69M SOL.
Transaction fees and Jito tips track network demand, and their weight in the total moves with it. Their combined share of operator income has ranged from 18.6% to 88.9% by month. Issuance commission moves slowly by design, so as its share shrinks an operator's income turns into a bet on how busy the chain is rather than on the inflation schedule.
Issuance commission, MEV and transaction fees
Issuance commission is the validator's percentage cut of the staking rewards Solana mints each epoch. Jito commission is its cut of the MEV tips searchers pay to have transactions bundled and landed. Transaction fees are the fees inside the blocks the validator produces as leader — priority fees (which now go entirely to validators) and base fees; until Alpenglow, the vote fees carried in every block counted here too. Self-staked operators charging 90% commission or more are counted only on their fees, since economically they are token holders staking to themselves rather than serving delegators.
Why it matters if you stake SOL
If you delegate SOL, the commission slice of this chart comes out of your staking rewards. The live validator ranking compares operators on commission and uptime; the staking calculator shows what the difference is worth on a real position.
Put the numbers to work
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