How much do validators make?
Solana validators make money from three sources: a cut of the staking rewards they pass on, the fees in the blocks they produce, and a cut of MEV tips. How much they make depends mostly on how much SOL is staked with them. A validator is a server that helps run the Solana network, and the operator pays for it in dollars while earning in SOL.
On late October 2026 numbers, a validator with 100,000 SOL staked at a 5% fee earns about 670 SOL a year before costs. The biggest validators hold millions of SOL and earn tens of thousands. Many small ones run at a loss. The rest of this page shows the sums.
Where Solana validator revenue comes from
A Solana validator has three income streams. Each one grows with the stake it holds.
The first is inflation commission. Every epoch, the network creates new SOL and pays it to stakers. The validator keeps its commission, a share it sets itself, and passes on the rest. An epoch now lasts about 26 hours.
The second is block fees. Validators take turns producing blocks, and each one gets turns in proportion to its stake. The block producer keeps all priority fees and half of the base fee on every transaction. Unlike inflation, these go to the validator first. Many validators choose to share some with stakers.
The third is MEV commission. Traders pay tips through Jito JTO$0.342-4.5% to get their trades placed in a certain order. Those tips flow to the validator and its stakers, and the validator keeps its MEV commission.
Latest (Epoch 1075): New SOL from inflation 62.3K SOL, Priority fees 4,545 SOL, Base fees kept by validators 434 SOL, Jito tips 1,327 SOL. Live data, updated daily.
View on Solana Compass →Inflation is by far the largest pool. In the latest full epoch the network created about 62K SOL in new rewards.
Block producers took about 4,545 SOL in priority fees in the same epoch. Our staking statistics page has the full history.
Solana validator block rewards vs commission: which earns more
For most validators, block fees now earn more than commission. Inflation is the biggest pool, but a validator keeps only its small share of it. Block fees are smaller in total, and the validator keeps all of them.
Take a validator with 100,000 SOL staked and a 5% fee. The table shows what each stream would bring in over a year at late October rates.
| Income stream | Per year, 100,000 SOL staked |
|---|---|
| 5% inflation commission | ~245 SOL |
| Priority fees and base fees | ~415 SOL |
| 10% MEV commission on Jito tips | ~11 SOL |
That changes how you should read a zero fee. A validator at 0% still earns its block fees. It gives up only the smaller of its two main income streams.
How much does it cost to run a Solana validator
Running a Solana validator costs a fixed fee in SOL to vote, plus servers and staff paid in dollars. Since the Alpenglow upgrade in October 2026, the voting cost is a Validator Admission Ticket. The Solana Foundation's Alpenglow guide puts it at a flat 0.8 SOL per epoch, taken from the validator's vote account.
That works out to roughly 270 SOL a year at today's epoch length. Before Alpenglow, validators paid a fee on every vote. Engineers at Galaxy Digital put that at about 2 SOL a day once slots fell to 200 milliseconds. The ticket cut the voting bill by more than half.
Hardware is the other big cost. A validator needs a fast, dedicated server in a data centre with a very fast link. Fidelity's research team put yearly running costs at about $60,000 and up in its October 2026 report, including servers and operations. Our guide to running a Solana validator lists the hardware itself.
The mismatch matters. Costs are paid in dollars, but revenue arrives in SOL. When the SOL price falls, the same stake covers fewer bills.
How much stake does a Solana validator need to break even
A Solana validator charging 5% needs about 40,000 SOL staked to pay for its voting ticket. Covering servers and staff as well takes more than three times that. The table shows how yearly revenue grows with stake.
| Stake on the validator | Revenue per year (5% fee, 10% MEV fee) | After the 0.8 SOL ticket | After ticket and $60k of costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50,000 SOL | ~335 SOL | ~60 SOL | about −560 SOL |
| 100,000 SOL | ~670 SOL | ~395 SOL | about −225 SOL |
| 250,000 SOL | ~1,670 SOL | ~1,400 SOL | ~780 SOL |
| 500,000 SOL | ~3,350 SOL | ~3,070 SOL | ~2,450 SOL |
| 1,000,000 SOL | ~6,690 SOL | ~6,420 SOL | ~5,800 SOL |
How we worked it out:
- Rewards are Solana Compass's reward data for epochs 1066 to 1071, 24 to 29 October 2026, averaged and scaled to a year.
- SOL is priced at about $97, so $60,000 is roughly 620 SOL.
- The validator keeps all its block fees, and the table counts only revenue from other people's stake. A validator's own SOL earns full rewards on top, like any staker's.
A validator charging nothing needs more stake. On the same numbers, it needs about 65,000 SOL to pay for its ticket.
Covering the rest of its costs takes around 210,000 SOL. Fidelity's report reached a similar break-even of about 200,000 SOL with its own assumptions.
These figures move with fees on the network. A busy month for trading lifts block fees a lot, and a quiet one cuts them.
How validators grow their stake on Solana
Most new validators start far below break-even, so the job is mostly winning stake. The Solana Foundation Delegation Program helps. It matches the stake a validator wins from others with an equal amount of its own, according to its published criteria. To qualify, a validator must keep commission at 5% or less and meet uptime and hosting rules.
Stake pools are the other big source. Pools spread their SOL across validators that meet their scoring rules, so good performance can bring stake in. Our guide to Solana stake pools explains how they choose.
Beyond that, it is marketing. Operators build a brand, run tools or content, and ask stakers to back them. Solana Compass runs its own validator, so we know this part well. Growing stake is slow work.
How many Solana validators are there, and why the number is falling
Solana has about 694 validators with active stake on Solana Compass's count. That number has fallen for more than a year, mainly because small validators could not cover their costs.
Bitwise's latest staking report put the drop at about 30% in a year and blamed cost pressure. Our own count was 958 a year earlier, in October 2025.
Latest (Epoch 1076): Validators with active stake 694. Live data, updated daily.
View on Solana Compass →Falling issuance is part of the squeeze. Solana's inflation rate drops by 15% each year, so each epoch pays out a little less new SOL. With more of the supply staked, that smaller pool is split more ways.
How much the largest Solana validators make
The largest validators earn far more than small ones, because revenue scales with stake. Figment, the biggest by stake in late October 2026, held about 17 million SOL at a 7% fee.
On the same reward rates as the table above, that stake would bring in roughly 130,000 SOL a year before costs. That assumes Figment keeps all of its block fees, which large operators often share with clients.
Large validators also carry large costs: staff, security, many servers and compliance. Some charge 100% commission because they stake their own or their customers' SOL and pass rewards on in other ways. About 24% of all staked SOL sits with validators at 100%.
For you as a staker, size does not decide your yield. A smaller validator with the same fee and uptime pays you the same. Our guide on choosing a Solana validator covers what to compare.
What's changing for Solana validator economics: Alpenglow and SIMDs
Several changes are reshaping what validators earn. Some are live and some are planned.
Alpenglow, built by Anza, went live on mainnet on 21 October 2026. It replaced per-vote fees with the flat admission ticket.
Alpenglow also caps the voting set at the top 2,000 validators by stake. Solana has far fewer than that today, so nobody is shut out yet.
SIMD-0123 lets stakers share in block fees. Validators approved it in a March 2025 vote, and it is not yet live. Once it is, each validator sets a separate fee on block income and the rest flows to stakers. Fidelity's report warned this could start a race to zero that large validators are better placed to win.
SIMD-0550 doubles how fast inflation falls each year. Stakers and validators backed it in the SGP-0002 vote on Solana's governance site.
The change was not yet active at the end of October 2026. Once it is, inflation rewards will shrink faster, and commission income with them.
A separate fee overhaul in the same vote round, SGP-0003, would have burned far more of each transaction fee. It fell short of the support it needed.
Together, these push validator income toward block fees and away from inflation. If you stake, our Solana staking rewards calculator shows what today's rates mean for your SOL. To stake with a validator that has run since 2021, see our page on staking with Solana Compass.
