Sending XLM: tiny fees, fast finality

Stellar Lumens transaction fees are among the smallest in crypto: the network charges a base fee of 100 stroops, or 0.00001 XLM, per operation, and a normal payment is a single operation. As for how long it takes to send XLM, a Stellar ledger closes in about 5 seconds, and once your transaction lands in a closed ledger it is final. No waiting for six confirmations, no “pending” limbo.

How to send Stellar Lumens comes down to four things: a funded wallet, the right address, a memo if the receiver is an exchange, and leaving at least 1 XLM in your own account. This guide explains each piece, including the parts people usually discover after a deposit goes missing. The live calculator above prices any number of transactions at the current base fee.

How much are Stellar Lumens transaction fees?

Stellar prices its fees in stroops. One stroop is 0.0000001 XLM (10⁻⁷), the smallest unit the ledger tracks. The minimum fee is 100 stroops per operation, according to SDF’s fee documentation. A transaction can bundle up to 100 classic operations, so paying ten people in one transaction costs ten times the base fee, which is still just 0.0001 XLM.

Stellar’s fee model has an unusual twist: fees are not paid to anyone. They go into a locked fee pool whose lumens, in the docs’ words, are “not given to or used by anyone”, and validators collect no fees or block rewards. At our latest check the pool held roughly 11 million XLM. Because the fee works as an anti-spam device rather than a revenue stream, it can stay tiny.

What do people actually pay? At our latest check of Horizon’s fee_stats endpoint, the most common fee charged was exactly 100 stroops. The median was higher, about 3,483 stroops (roughly 0.00035 XLM), because smart-contract transactions carry extra resource fees and pull the average up. For a plain XLM payment, the base fee is what you should expect.

Surge pricing and fee bidding

On mainnet, a ledger holds up to 1,000 classic operations and 2,000 smart-contract transactions. When more arrive than fit, Stellar switches to surge pricing: transactions are ranked by the inclusion fee they bid, and the highest bidders get in. Crucially, everyone included pays the lowest winning fee in that set, not their own maximum. So setting a higher maximum fee during busy periods is a cap you are willing to pay, not an amount you will automatically be charged. Wallets normally set this for you.

Soroban resource fees for smart contracts

Calling a Soroban smart contract is different. The total fee is the inclusion fee plus a resource fee covering CPU instructions, ledger reads and writes, transaction size, events and return values, and rent for stored data. Unused rent, events and return-value budget are refunded; CPU, read and write bytes and bandwidth are not. That is why a DeFi swap costs noticeably more than a plain payment, though both stay small by blockchain standards.

How long does it take to send XLM? Speed and finality

XLM transaction speed is set by the ledger clock. SDF says consensus “generally takes about 5 seconds”, and a live check of 200 recent ledgers averaged 5.0 seconds. Your transaction is included in the next ledger that has room for it, so in normal conditions it is done within one or two ledger closes.

The more important number is finality time. Stellar runs the Stellar Consensus Protocol, a form of federated Byzantine agreement in which each validator chooses which other validators it trusts. SCP is designed to stall rather than fork. That means a closed ledger is not going to be reorganised away later, so there are no probabilistic confirmations to count. When the ledger closes, the payment is final.

In practice, slow transfers rarely come from the network. The usual causes are an exchange’s withdrawal queue, compliance checks, a wallet that has not refreshed, or a missing memo. If a transfer seems slow, paste the transaction hash into an XLM explorer: if it shows a closed ledger, the network part is finished.

Stellar TPS: theoretical capacity vs observed throughput

Stellar TPS figures get mangled more than almost any other statistic, so it helps to keep three numbers apart.

SDF set out its scaling plan in The Road to 5,000 TPS and later reported reaching more than 2,000 TPS of theoretical capacity. The busiest stretch actually observed on mainnet was more modest: Chainspect recorded more than 211 TPS sustained over 100 blocks in mid-September 2026, as reported by CryptoSlate, with later reports citing 217.4 TPS. Day to day, our sample showed about 51 transactions per second. Be wary of “1,000 TPS” or “millions of payments per second” claims; they are benchmarks or estimates, not mainnet observations. The network runs well below its ceiling most of the time, which is why base fees are the norm.

Minimum balance and base reserve: the XLM you can’t send

Every Stellar account must hold a minimum balance, measured in base reserves. One base reserve is currently 0.5 XLM, and an account needs two of them, so the floor is 1 XLM. Each subentry adds another 0.5 XLM: a trustline to hold USDC, an open offer on the DEX, an extra signer or a data entry. The docs give the example of an account with three subentries and one claimable-balance claimant needing 3 XLM.

Two practical effects follow. You can never send your entire balance while the account stays open. And brand-new addresses do not exist on the ledger until someone funds them. Funding one needs a Create Account operation with at least the minimum reserve; a regular payment fails with a “destination does not exist” error, per the list of operations. If you are setting up a fresh wallet, the first deposit from an exchange usually takes care of this. Learn more about holding XLM in our guide to Stellar wallets.

Memo types and why exchanges insist on them

A Stellar transaction can carry one memo. The transactions documentation defines four types: MEMO_TEXT (up to 28 bytes of text), MEMO_ID (a 64-bit number), MEMO_HASH (a 32-byte hash) and MEMO_RETURN (a 32-byte hash identifying a transaction being refunded). For everyday users, only the first two matter.

Exchanges commonly ask for a memo, usually a numeric MEMO_ID, alongside their deposit address. Think of the address as the building and the memo as the flat number: without it, your XLM arrives where nobody expects it.

Some platforms use muxed addresses instead. These start with “M” rather than “G” and embed the customer identifier inside the address itself (CAP-27), removing the separate memo step. If you see an M-address, you can paste it as-is.

How to send Stellar Lumens, step by step

The flow is nearly identical in LOBSTR, Varial (formerly Freighter) or a hardware wallet with a Stellar app. Here is the safe version.

1. Check your available balance
   Look at the spendable amount, not the total. 1 XLM plus 0.5 XLM per trustline or offer stays locked as a reserve, so every token you hold, such as USDC, ties up another 0.5 XLM.
2. Get the destination address and memo
   Copy the receiver’s public key, a 56-character string starting with G (or an M-address). If the receiver is an exchange, copy the memo too, and note whether it is an ID or text memo. Never type addresses by hand.
3. Verify the address
   Compare the first and last five or six characters of the pasted address with the original. Clipboard-hijacking malware swaps addresses silently, and a Stellar payment cannot be reversed once the ledger closes.
4. Enter amount, memo and fee
   Type the amount in XLM, paste the memo into the memo field, and leave the fee at the default unless the wallet warns of congestion. For a new, unfunded address, send at least 1 XLM so the account can be created.
5. Send a test amount first
   For large transfers or a first deposit to a new exchange, send a small amount, confirm it arrives and is credited, then send the rest. The extra fee is negligible.
6. Confirm on the ledger
   Copy the transaction hash and look it up in an explorer. A successful status in a closed ledger means the payment is final; anything after that is the receiver’s processing time.

Pan-chan says

That five-second test transfer is the cheapest insurance in crypto. I always do it before moving anything I’d miss.

If you don’t hold any lumens yet, our guide on how to buy Stellar Lumens covers card and bank options across Asia.

Why your exchange charges more than the network fee

You may see an exchange withdrawal fee that is thousands of times the 0.00001 XLM network minimum. That is not the network being expensive. The exchange is pricing its own service: running hot wallets, monitoring withdrawals, compliance screening, customer support, and often the cost of creating new accounts for first-time recipients, which requires at least 1 XLM. Many platforms set a flat withdrawal fee per asset and adjust it from time to time.

Compare withdrawal fees before you choose where to buy, especially if you move small amounts often: a worker in Seoul topping up a self-custody wallet every week feels a flat fee far more than someone moving one large sum. Once XLM is in your own wallet, further transfers cost only the network fee, which is why many people treat the exchange as an on-ramp rather than a home. Policies change, so check the current fee schedule.

Failed transactions: what goes wrong and what it costs

Stellar transactions are atomic: if one operation fails, the whole transaction is rolled back, except the fee. SDF’s analytics documentation notes that the inclusion fee and non-refundable resource fees are charged whether or not the transaction succeeds. For a simple payment, that loss is 100 stroops.

The usual suspects:

• No destination: you sent a payment to an address that has never been funded. Use a create-account transfer of at least 1 XLM instead.
• Underfunded: the amount plus fee would push your balance below the reserve.
• No trustline: you tried to send a token such as USDC to an account that has not opted in to it.
• Bad sequence or expired time bounds: the transaction is stale. Rebuilding and re-signing it fixes this.

Some problems, such as a stale sequence number, usually get a transaction rejected before it reaches a ledger. Others only surface when the ledger applies it, and those appear in an explorer as failed, with a result code that tells you exactly what to fix. Our Stellar glossary explains terms like trustline, sequence number and reserve if any of them are new.

XLM vs a bank wire: what the comparison really shows

It is tempting to say “Stellar takes five seconds, banks take days”, but Swift’s own data is more nuanced. In an October 2024 report, Swift said 90% of cross-border payments on its network reach the destination bank within an hour, while only 43% are credited to the end customer within that hour. Its September 2025 update put 75% of payments at the beneficiary’s bank within 10 minutes, while noting that final crediting can take more than a day in some countries.

So the honest comparison: an XLM payment settles between two accounts in about 5 seconds, any day of the week, for a fraction of a cent in network fees, while a wire involves intermediaries, cut-off times and per-transfer charges. Stellar does not remove the last mile, though. Someone still has to convert lumens or stablecoins on Stellar into local currency, with its own fees and spreads. For a full look at remittance corridors, costs and the anchors that bridge crypto and cash, see our guide to cross-border payments on Stellar.

Ryu says

Network fees are the easy part. When you compare options, add up the exchange fee, the spread and the cash-out cost; that’s the number your family actually feels.

Curious how this stacks up against XLM’s closest relative? Read our XLM vs XRP comparison, or use the live XLM price to convert stroops into your currency.

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