XRP Ledger Account Reserve: Base and Owner Reserve Explained

The reserve catches two kinds of reader: the person who funds a first wallet with exactly the minimum, and the person who cannot see why their balance is higher than what they can send. Both are the same thing seen from two sides. The table below has the amounts; the rest of the page is about when each one applies.

Base reserve and owner reserve: how much?

The Mainnet reserve is a base of 1 XRP plus an owner reserve of 0.2 XRP per item, checked on 2026-10-21. Both took effect by validator vote on 2024-12-02. Other networks may use different numbers.

“Locked” does not mean “frozen”. You can still use reserved XRP to pay transaction fees. What you cannot do is send the portion at or below the reserve to anyone else. Because amounts change, check the reserves documentation before you rely on a number from any page, this one included.

Trust lines are the most common owned object, and the trust lines guide covers them. The first two trust lines need no owner reserve, so a new account can hold them on the base reserve alone. Fund the account with more than 1 XRP and the normal reserve applies to those first two as well.

Why it exists

Spam. Each new ledger version holds the full state of the ledger, and that state grows with every account. The reserve protects the shared ledger from growing too large through spam or malicious use. Unused accounts and data cannot be pruned automatically, so reserves give owners a reason to delete what they no longer use.

The target is modest: a current commodity-level machine should always be able to fit the current ledger in RAM. Set the reserves too low and a malicious user could overload the network by creating too many ledger entries. In other words, the settings mostly protect servers’ RAM and disk space.

Remove an object and it stops counting, so its owner reserve is released.

How an account gets created

There is no “create account” transaction. A Payment creates the account automatically when it sends enough XRP to a mathematically valid address that has none yet. The amount has to meet the reserve requirement.

So the first time XRP arrives at your own address, you pay the account reserve, and that amount stays locked. The base reserve is also the minimum needed to fund a new account.

What counts toward the owner reserve

Items an account can own include trust lines, open orders and tickets. Each one raises the owner’s total requirement by the owner reserve, and each one you remove lowers it again.

A few details change the count:

• NFTs are grouped into pages of up to 32 NFTs each, and the owner reserve applies per page, not per NFT.
• On a trust line, the token holder usually owes the reserve and the issuer does not.
• The owner directory itself does not count.

To work out an account’s total, multiply OwnerCount by reserve_inc_xrp and add reserve_base_xrp. Applications can read the current base and incremental values with the server_info or server_state method.

Reserve versus transaction cost

They are different things. A reserve is held and can be released. The transaction cost is destroyed, and the transaction cost guide has the fee side. The cheapest possible transaction destroys an amount of XRP measured in drops, and 1 XRP equals 1 million drops. The Fee Voting documentation covers how that base amount is set.

That matters because the cost is one way an account slips under its requirement: the sender’s balance shrinks during transaction processing and can end up below the reserve.

What happens below the reserve

The account is limited, not closed. With less XRP than its current requirement, it cannot send XRP to others or create objects that would raise the requirement. It keeps existing, and it can still send transactions that do neither, as long as it can pay the transaction cost.

To climb back, receive enough XRP, or wait for the requirement to drop below your balance. An address under the reserve can also send an OfferCreate transaction to acquire more XRP.

Getting the reserve back: deleting an account

The owner can send an AccountDelete transaction to remove the account and its entries, with most of the remaining XRP going to another account. You recover some of the 1 XRP reserve, but you must still destroy at least 0.2 XRP. That price is deliberately higher than a normal fee, to discourage wasteful creation and deletion of accounts.

An account can be deleted only when all of these hold:

After deletion the address can be re-created the normal way.

Wallets and exchanges

Custodial exchanges usually hold all their customers’ XRP in a few shared ledger accounts, so customers there do not pay the reserve for individual accounts. With no individual XRP Ledger account of your own, the requirement does not apply to you. Once you hold an account yourself, it carries the reserve, paid the first time XRP arrives at your address. The wallets guide shows how that account is set up.

Reserves have changed before

Validators can agree on new reserve settings through the Fee Voting process, and any change has to be approved by the consensus process; the consensus guide explains how. Raising the requirements is generally more disruptive than lowering them.

The 1 XRP and 0.2 XRP amounts are not original. On 2021-09-19, new values took effect after a majority of validators supported them: 10 XRP base plus 2 XRP per owned object, down from 20 XRP base and 5 XRP per object. On 2024-12-02 the validators voted again, and the requirement became 1 XRP base (down from 10 XRP) and 0.2 XRP per item (down from 2 XRP). The 10/2 and 20/5 pairs are history, not today’s amounts. The transaction cost of 10 drops did not change in 2024.

They could move again. Mainnet validators were split near 50% across several preferred settings in 2024, so one validator going offline or changing its vote could shift the median. Look up the requirement with the fee method rather than hard-coding it, and hold more than the minimum in case reserves rise. The same advice applied in the 20 XRP era of 2021: query the reserve from the API. One technical note: because of the XRPFees amendment, the FeeSettings ledger entry changed format when the new settings took effect, so code that reads that entry directly needs updating.

The other accounts guides cover wallets, tags and scams.