Four instructions withdraw the rent surplus Solana's price cut left in old accounts

Rent is one multiplication now: (128 + data length) x lamports per byte, with the 128 as fixed per-account overhead ^[1]. The two-year multiplier that used to sit in that formula was folded into the byte price earlier this year ^[2]. So the surplus on an account funded before a cut is its length times the price delta. Two steps in, that delta is 1,880 lamports per byte ^[6], which is 6,960 minus 5,080 ^[22]. A vote account holds 3,762 bytes of data, so (128 + 3,762) x 1,880 works out to 7,313,200 lamports, about 0.0073 SOL ^[23]. The dev.to post that worked this through publishes the same number ^[9].

Four programs guard those accounts, so there are four instructions, sharing one rule: the account keeps at least the current rent-exempt minimum, and the signer is the account's own authority ^[11]. Nonce accounts use WithdrawNonceAccount, signed by the nonce authority, for any amount above that minimum ^[12]. Token accounts use WithdrawExcessLamports, signed by the owner; both token programs carry it for precisely this case, and the account stays open and usable afterwards ^[16]. Stake is fussier. On a delegated account only the portion above the delegated stake plus the reserve can leave, and on a deactivated one anything above the reserve ^[13]. Nothing here closes an account, and nothing needs a third party to hold a key ^[17].

Vote accounts are the awkward case. The authorized withdrawer has to leave the rent-exempt minimum plus pending delegator rewards, which sit in the balance but are not the operator's to take ^[14]. Once Alpenglow activates, the account also has to hold one epoch's admission ticket: 1.2 SOL at today's 300 ms slots, falling to 1.0 SOL from epoch 1037 when slots go to 250 ms ^[15]. That ticket is roughly fifty times the 0.024 SOL a vote account will have spare at the end of the ladder ^[27]. The Alpenglow gate had not activated on mainnet as of 17 September 2026 ^[15].

Per account, the amounts are small. The post's examples are a validator running a hundred nonce accounts for a signing pipeline, a distribution program that created ten thousand stake accounts, and a market maker with a thousand token accounts ^[29]. At the final step, ten thousand stake accounts carry about 21 SOL of surplus between them ^[25], and a thousand token accounts about 1.8 SOL ^[26]. Nothing created after the last cut has anything to reclaim, so the stock of over-funded accounts is fixed the day the ladder finishes and shrinks only as owners notice ^[10].

Three steps remain, expected with Agave 4.4 ^[7]. A separate gate, set_lamports_per_byte_to_6960, restores the original price, had not activated on mainnet as of 17 September 2026, and takes priority in the validator's ordering rule: a rollback and a cut activating in the same epoch resolve to the rollback ^[19]. Among the cuts, several in one epoch resolve to the lowest price, and out-of-order activation resolves to the most recently activated one ^[20]. The post does not say what happens to an account already swept down to the step-two minimum if the original price comes back. The author also runs a tool that builds the withdrawal batch for the accounts a connected wallet controls, with the wallet signing it ^[18].