TON fees: how they're calculated and why so low (2026)

Low fees are one of the main reasons TON became the crypto on-ramp for millions of users. But how exactly are these fees calculated? Why are they so much lower than Ethereum’s? And what does “fixed gas price” mean — is there a catch? Below — the mechanics and the actual 2026 numbers.

What a transaction really costs

Numbers first, mechanics next.

These are orders of magnitude, not exact figures — every transaction is a little different. But the level is clear: serious activity on TON is measured in cents per operation, not dollars.

In April 2026 there was a 6× cut to base fees after the Catchain 2.0 upgrade. Before that a simple transfer cost ~0.03 TON; now it’s ~0.005 TON.

Comparison with other networks

TON ranks second cheapest in this table, after Solana. The key difference — Solana pays for it in reliability (historical outages); TON has stayed stable.

Anatomy of a fee

A TON fee isn’t a single number like Ethereum’s gas — it’s a sum of four components:

1. Storage fee — for keeping the contract in state.
2. Compute fee — for executing code in TVM (gas).
3. Forward fee — for sending a message to another contract.
4. Action fee — for the contract performing actions (creating messages, code changes).

Let’s break each one down.

Storage fee — paying rent

Every contract on TON occupies space in state — the distributed database of every account. That space costs.

The storage fee is deducted from the contract’s own balance periodically, on every activation. Formula:

storage_fee = bit_price × cell_count_bits + cell_price × cell_count
            × duration_seconds

In real numbers for a typical wallet contract in 2026, that’s fractions of a cent per year. A contract with no activity lives for years, spending around 0.001–0.01 TON on storage.

Compute fee — TON’s gas

Compute fee pays for TVM instruction execution. Each operation in the virtual machine costs a defined number of gas units. The price of one gas unit is fixed in network configuration — in 2026 it’s 1 TON per billion gas units in basechain.

A simple TON transfer uses ~10,000–20,000 gas → ~0.00001–0.00002 TON. A jetton transfer — ~50,000–100,000 gas → ~0.00005–0.0001 TON. A complex DEX swap — 200,000–500,000 gas → ~0.0002–0.0005 TON.

Note — that’s not the largest part of the fee. Compute is almost always smaller than forward fee.

Forward fee — paying for messages

When a contract sends a message to another contract, it pays for “delivery”. Formula:

fwd_fee = lump_price + price_per_cell × (cells - 1)
        + price_per_bit × (bits - bits_in_root_cell)

lump_price — fixed base, ~0.0001 TON in basechain. price_per_cell and price_per_bit scale with message size.

For a typical transfer the forward fee is ~0.001–0.005 TON per message.

Action fee — paying for actions

When a contract, after executing, wants to send N outgoing messages or change its code, each such action costs an action fee — typically ~0.0001–0.001 TON per action.

The total — pennies for most scenarios.

Where the expensive scenarios hide

The genuinely “expensive” TON transactions tie to three cases:

1. Deploying a new contract

The first transaction at a new address deploys the contract — it commits the code plus initial state to the blockchain. That burns an additional 0.005–0.05 TON on top of the regular fee.

2. Large message payload

If you attach a long comment to a transaction (say a long Tonkeeper message) or a complex jetton payload, forward fee scales with size. A 1 KB message costs noticeably more than a “bare” transfer.

3. Complex DeFi operations

A multi-pool DEX swap, a refinance on EVAA, an NFT collection mint — these are dozens of inter-contract messages. Each one costs forward + action fee. The total can climb to 0.3–0.5 TON.

Why so cheap: three reasons

1. Sharding

Dynamic sharding means load spreads across parallel sub-networks. In Ethereum every transaction competes for one block of ~30M gas. In TON — in theory you can split into hundreds of shards and process everything in parallel.

In 2025–2026 basechain runs as a single shard (no need to split), but the architecture is ready to scale at any moment.

2. Async model

In Ethereum a single complex contract in one block can eat most of the gas limit, raising the price for everyone else. On TON each message is processed independently, and contracts “talk” through a queue — no race for a global resource.

3. Fixed gas price

In EVM the gas price is determined by auction — users bid for block space. When the network is loaded, gas can spike by orders of magnitude (we saw $200 swaps in DeFi summer 2020).

On TON the gas price is hard-coded in blockchain configuration. To change it requires a validator vote. Implications:

• Stable pricing — fees don’t jump with demand.
• No MEV gas wars (no front-running on gas).
• Predictable cost for businesses.

The downside: under network overload transactions queue up rather than getting more expensive. But in 2025–2026 TON has not hit throughput limits.

Who pays the fee

Trick question. In EVM the answer is simple: the sender pays gas for the whole transaction.

On TON it’s distributed:

• Compute fee in each transaction is paid by the contract that’s executing.
• Forward fee is paid by the sender of the message (deducted from message value).
• Storage fee is paid by the contract itself periodically.
• Action fee is paid by the contract performing the action.

Practical takeaway: the receiver also pays. When Alice sends Bob 1 TON, Bob’s side consumes ~0.001 TON (storage + compute on Bob’s side) processing the inbound message. So Bob sees not exactly 1 TON but 0.999 TON.

Wallets (Tonkeeper, MyTonWallet) ship with a “send exactly X” option — the sender reserves an extra amount to cover the receiver’s fee. Useful for business flows.

How to save on fees

A few practical tips:

1. Batch operations. When doing several swaps, sometimes a DEX aggregator beats individual operations.
2. Use a non-bounceable address for exchange withdrawals. A UQ address doesn’t require activation; less risk of bounce-related loss.
3. Don’t attach huge comments. “Happy birthday” — fine. A novel — you’ll pay more in forward fee.
4. Regular activity reduces storage fee. A frequently-used contract doesn’t accumulate large storage debt.
5. Deploy contracts in basechain, not masterchain. Masterchain is intentionally pricier (it’s for system operations).

When fees might rise

The TON gas price can go up if validators vote to change the configuration. That happened in the opposite direction in April 2026 — a 6× cut. It can swing the other way if the network gets overloaded.

Even then TON would stay significantly cheaper than EVM: the “cheapness” buffer is large.

What next

If you want to see how much was spent on a specific transaction — the TonScan guide. To understand why TON is architecturally different from EVM — the EVM-incompatibility piece. Network basics — the TON full guide.

Sources

• TON documentation on fees
• Tonkeeper blog: TON vs other blockchains fee comparison
• tonstat.com — network statistics
• Token Terminal: average fee per chain