How Does Solana Staking Work? Where Your Rewards Come From and When They're Paid

Solana staking works by assigning your SOL to a validator, one of the computers that runs the network. This is called delegating. Your SOL stays in a stake account that only you control. In return, the network pays you new SOL every epoch, a stretch of about a day. How much you get depends on how much you stake, how well your validator votes, and the cut it keeps, called commission. Rewards come to around 5% a year. Staking on an exchange is a different product: the exchange stakes for you and sets its own rate.

In the latest epoch Solana Compass measured, the average staker earned 5.0% a year: 4.8% from inflation and 0.15% from MEV tips.

Where Solana staking rewards come from: inflation, fees and MEV

Almost all Solana staking rewards come from inflation: new SOL the network makes each year. The rest comes from MEV tips. MEV is the profit traders can make from the order of trades in a block, so they pay tips to get their trades in first. Fees mostly stay with validators. No network rule passes them on to you.

Inflation is paid straight to your stake account by the network. Tips take a side road. Most validators run software from Jito JTO$0.371-9.9%, which collects their tips each epoch. When the epoch ends, the validator keeps its MEV commission and the rest is split across its stake accounts by size. Under Jito's JIP-8 rules, 3% of all tips goes to the Jito DAO and its operators first.

Solana's fee rules burn half of each base fee and give the rest to the validator that made the block. Since SIMD-0096 went live in early 2025, that validator also keeps all priority fees, the extra fees users pay to jump the queue. Some share it by choice; the network does not. You can follow fees and tips on our network fees dashboard.

In the last full epoch Solana Compass measured, new SOL from inflation made up 89% of everything the network paid to validators and stakers.

How Solana's inflation schedule sets the base staking yield

The inflation rate sets the base yield for every Solana staker. The network creates new SOL at a rate that started high and falls by a set step each year, down to a floor of 1.5%. After several years of cuts it sits below 4%. Only staked SOL shares the new coins. So your base yield is about the inflation rate divided by the share of all SOL that is staked. The live inflation rate and supply are on our tokenomics page.

In the latest epoch, Solana's inflation rate was 3.58% a year, and 69% of all SOL was staked.

The more SOL is staked, the thinner each slice. The table uses round numbers to show the effect.

That decline is set to speed up. In August 2026, validators voted to make inflation fall twice as fast each year, CoinDesk reported. Lostin and 0xIchigo of Helius wrote the proposal. Once it takes effect, inflation reaches its floor in about three years instead of about six, and base yields fall with it.

How Solana staking rewards are calculated: stake, vote credits and Alpenglow

Solana splits each epoch's new SOL by two things: how much SOL is staked with a validator, and how many of that validator's votes counted. A validator votes to agree on each new block, and a vote counts when it arrives in time. The more of its votes count, the bigger its share. Your validator then takes its commission. The rest is added to your stake account, where it starts earning too.

Until October 2026 that count was kept as vote credits. In the staking docs of Anza, which builds the Agave validator software, points are vote credits times stake.

On 21 October 2026, Alpenglow went live on mainnet and replaced the old voting system. Validators now swap votes with each other and bundle them into certificates. The Alpenglow proposal keeps the same reward rules, but pays for votes that make it into those bundles. As the staking firm P2P.org puts it, "Vote credits now derive from those certificates."

Here is what that means for you. If your validator's votes count a tenth less often than average, you get about a tenth less, even at zero commission. So a cheap validator with a poor voting record can pay you less than a pricier one that votes well.

Alpenglow adds one more check. Each validator pays an entry fee before every epoch, called the Validator Admission Ticket. A validator that can't pay sits the epoch out, and its stakers earn no inflation rewards for it.

Validator commission vs MEV commission: what each takes from your rewards

For most stakers, the inflation commission matters far more than the MEV one, since inflation is most of the reward. Each is a cut the validator keeps: one from your inflation rewards, one from your tips. Solana Compass's validator data shows most staked SOL is with validators that charge 10% or less. A large block sits with ones that charge 100%. Most of those are private validators run by exchanges and custodians for their own or their customers' SOL, and they pass no inflation rewards to the stake account.

Here is how that plays out on 100 SOL staked for a year, if the network pays about 5% before commission and your validator votes as well as average. Rewards compound a little, since they are added every epoch.

MEV commission works the same way on tips. In quiet markets tips are a small slice, so the MEV fee moves your yield by a fraction of a point. In busy markets that slice can grow several times over. Our breakdown of what a Solana validator earns and spends shows why some charge more than others.

Commission can change after you stake. Since SIMD-0249, a change takes effect only after a delay, which gives you time to move. So check a validator's commission history, too.

When are Solana staking rewards paid? Epoch length, warmup and the first payout

Solana pays staking rewards once per epoch, at the start of the next one. By Solana Compass's count, an epoch has lasted about a day since Solana sped up its blocks again in October 2026. That is far shorter than the two to three days many guides still quote. New stake starts earning at the next epoch boundary. So your first reward usually lands one to two epochs after you stake.

By our measure, the last full epoch lasted 26 hours. The current one is 52% through, so the next payout is about 12 hours away.

An epoch is a fixed number of slots, the short windows in which one validator makes a block. SIMD-0525 cut slot times in steps from August to October 2026, and Solana Compass measured epochs shrinking from about two days to about one. You now get smaller payments more often, but the yearly total stays the same, because inflation is tied to calendar time.

Under partitioned epoch rewards, the network pays rewards over the first blocks of the new epoch. Jito tips arrive a little later. Both show up as a bigger stake account balance.

New stake goes through a short warmup, which is why the first reward takes one to two epochs. If a lot of SOL joins at once, a cap applies: at most 9% of active stake can switch on per epoch, as SIMD-0391 sets out.

Unstaking runs the same clock in reverse. Solana Compass's guide to unstaking and withdrawing SOL covers the wait and the ways to skip it.

Solana staking APY vs APR: why quoted yields differ

APY is the better measure for native Solana staking, because your rewards are added to your stake every epoch and start to earn too. APR is the same rate without that compounding. At around 5% a year the gap is small, about a tenth of a point. The big gaps between quoted yields come from what each figure counts.

Check four things when two sites quote different yields:

• the validator's inflation commission, taken off or not;
• Jito MEV tips, and which MEV commission comes off them;
• a forecast from the inflation rate, or a return measured over past epochs;
• for a liquid staking token, the pool's own fee.

Inflation is shared across all stake, so that part of every validator's yield sits in a tight range. A validator quoting far above the rest is often adding fees it shares, or using a short, lucky stretch. To turn any of these rates into SOL on your own balance, our calculator walkthrough explains each input.

How much do Solana stakers earn? Realised yields from on-chain data

Solana stakers earn around 5% a year on average, according to Solana Compass's yield data. Most of it comes from inflation. On 100 SOL, that is about five SOL a year. It is a past average, not a promise, and it moves with inflation and each validator's fees.

The mix can change a lot. In a busy period such as January 2025, MEV tips made up close to a third of what the average staker earned. The table shows that month next to a quiet stretch in late September 2026.

Inflation paid more then too, because the rate falls every year. When busy markets push tips up again, your validator's MEV commission starts to matter.

Solana Compass builds the figure from how each validator's stake accounts grow, epoch by epoch. The average is a simple mean across validators with at least ten measured stake accounts, leaving out those that pay nothing. The staking statistics dashboard charts the full history.

Native staking vs liquid staking rewards (JitoSOL, mSOL)

Native and liquid staking earn the same network rewards, so their yields are close. They differ in fees, tip sharing and how fast you can get out. Native stake sits in your own stake account and takes about an epoch to unstake. With liquid staking, a pool stakes your SOL and hands you a token in return, such as JitoSOL or mSOL. You can sell or use that token at any time.

Stake pools hold 13% of all staked SOL, by Solana Compass's count.

With a liquid staking token, your balance stays the same and each token is worth a little more SOL every epoch. Pools charge their own fee on top of validator commission. Our explainer on how stake pools work and what they charge goes through the fee types.

The easy exit has a cost. In a sell-off, the token's price can dip below what it redeems for, and a smart contract sits between you and your stake. Marinade MNDE$0.025-2.4% and Jito run two of the larger pools, and the Solana Compass stake pool comparison lists them side by side.

Risks that shrink Solana staking rewards: dilution, delinquency and slashing

Staking on Solana mainly protects you from dilution: your slice of all SOL getting smaller as new coins are made. Most rewards are new SOL. So if you don't stake, your slice shrinks each year by about the inflation rate. Solana has no automatic slashing, so a validator's mistakes can't take your SOL. What you can lose is rewards. A validator that goes offline, or keeps 100% commission, pays you nothing.

Here is dilution on 100 SOL held for a year, if the network adds about 3.5% new SOL and pays stakers about five percent before commission.

A delinquent validator is one that has stopped voting, and it earns nothing for its stakers until it comes back. This is rare, but moving away costs an epoch to unstake and another to start earning elsewhere.

Slashing means cutting a validator's stake as a penalty for breaking the rules. The closest proposal on Solana, SIMD-0204, would only record proven faults on chain. Its text says it "does not modify any stakes or rewards", and it was not live on mainnet in October 2026. The Alpenglow proposal calls casting two conflicting votes "a provable offence" but sets no penalty for it.

A stake account holds a small rent deposit that you get back when you close it. Staking rewards may count as taxable income where you live.

Picking a validator for higher net rewards

Picking a validator for higher net rewards comes down to three checks: its commission, its voting record and its MEV policy. Look for a fair commission and no history of raising it. A good voting record and no recent downtime keep your rewards up. An MEV commission below 100% means tips reach you. After that, staking takes one transaction from your wallet, and at least 1 SOL.

That minimum arrived in June 2026 with a stake program update, SIMD-0490, so older guides that say any amount works are out of date. Below it, a liquid staking token earns the same rewards.

Splitting your stake across two or three validators limits the harm if one goes offline or raises its fee. Solana Compass's validator list compares commission, MEV commission and realised yield for each one, and our checklist for weighing up a validator covers the warning signs.

Our walkthrough for delegating from Phantom, Solflare or a Ledger shows each wallet's screens. The Solana Compass staking page puts the options in one place. We run a validator, so that page covers our own products too.