Glossary · Ledger

Transaction fee.

The ada paid to the network for including a transaction. Deterministic on Cardano.

Think of it as

Postage. Same transaction, same fee, every time. No tipping for faster delivery.

In depth

The base of Cardano’s minimum fee is a·size + b lovelace, where a and b are protocol parameters. Plutus transactions add a cost for the memory and CPU steps their scripts declare, and since the Conway era a transaction also pays for the total size of the reference scripts it uses (a tiered per-byte price). There is no bidding: two identical transactions always pay the same fee.

Example

A simple ada transfer of around 300 bytes, with no scripts, costs roughly 0.17 ada in fees.

Next on this path

  1. Fee market A pricing regime where users bid for inclusion. Higher fees mean faster confirmation.
  2. Mempool A node-local pool of pending transactions waiting to be included in a block.