Gas (transaction fee on TON)

Gas on TON is the unit of computation work used to price contract execution. Every TVM instruction has a fixed gas cost; the total gas a transaction burns is multiplied by the gas price (set in masterchain config) and paid in TON.

What you actually pay

A real-world transaction fee is a sum of three components:

1. Compute (gas) fee — gas units × gas price. Set by masterchain config; basechain prices are far lower than masterchain prices.
2. Forward fee — the cost of carrying the message between contracts and across shards. Roughly lumpPrice + priceForCells × extraCells + priceForBits × extraBits.
3. Storage fee — a small periodic charge proportional to contract size and elapsed time, debited the next time the contract is touched.

For a wallet → wallet TON transfer in 2026 the total is around 0.005 TON, i.e. fractions of a US cent.

For more complex operations:

• Jetton transfer (USDT, NOT, etc.): ~0.05–0.1 TON because the message hops across the sender’s wallet contract → jetton wallet → recipient’s jetton wallet → recipient.
• DEX swap on STON.fi or DeDust: ~0.3–0.5 TON — multi-contract, with multiple message hops.
• NFT transfer: ~0.05 TON.

Gas budget in messages

When a wallet sends a message it attaches a TON amount that covers both the value being sent and the gas the receiver will spend. If the receiver runs out of gas, the message bounces (if bounceable=true) and most of the unused TON returns to the sender. This is why TON does not have a separate “gas tank” — gas comes from the message itself.

Why it stays cheap

Three architectural choices keep TON gas low:

• Sharding. Load is distributed across parallel shardchains; congestion in one shard does not raise the price in another.
• No mempool auction. Validators do not bid up gas based on demand; the price is set by governance and changes slowly.
• Dense cell encoding. TVM instructions are compact, so a complex contract still fits in fewer cells than its EVM equivalent.

Storage fees and frozen contracts

If a contract’s balance falls below the cost of its accumulated storage for too long, it gets frozen. A frozen contract does not process messages until someone tops it up and unfreezes it. Wallet contracts you never use can survive for years on a fraction of a TON, but stale jetton wallets sometimes need a small top-up before they can move funds.

Compared with Ethereum

In 2026, an Ethereum L1 ERC-20 transfer typically costs $0.20–$2.00. The equivalent jetton transfer on TON costs roughly $0.05. The gap is bigger for complex DeFi: a Uniswap swap can cost several dollars on Ethereum L1, where a STON.fi or DeDust swap is well under a dollar.

The trade-off is a different transaction model — asynchronous messaging, fees split into three components — that some developers find harder to reason about.