Storage Fee

Storage Fee is TON’s fee for the persistent storage of a contract’s state on chain. Unlike Ethereum, where state is kept “forever” for free, in TON every contract pays rent for the space it occupies in the network’s state.

How it’s computed

Storage fee is accrued on every transaction the contract performs and depends on two factors:

• Stored data size in bits and cells, including the contract’s code.
• Time since the previous transaction in seconds.

The formula multiplies these together: bigger state plus longer silence equals higher accumulated fee. The pricing constants come from the network configuration.

Why this model

It addresses the state-bloat problem familiar from Ethereum, where thousands of inactive contracts permanently occupy state and validators carry them in memory for free. In TON, contract owners are incentivised not to leave large dead state lying around — the meter keeps running.

Practical consequences

• Wallets need topping up. A wallet contract with a tiny balance and long idle periods can eventually run dry on storage fees. At that point the network freezes the contract.
• Frozen contracts. If the balance goes negative the contract enters frozen state. To revive it, someone must send TON to cover the debt plus an unfreeze message.
• Storage deposit. Contracts are usually deployed with a small reserve (0.01–0.1 TON), which sustains years of idle existence.

For a typical user wallet, storage fee is a few cents per year. For large DEX contracts holding hundreds of kilobytes of state, it can become a noticeable annual cost.