Getting reserves back · Accounts and reserves

Reserves are locked, not spent. There are two ways to get them back.

Remove what you no longer use. Each item you own locks 0.2 XRP. Close a trust line or cancel an old offer. Each removal unlocks 0.2 XRP. This is the common case.

Delete the account. An AccountDelete transaction sends the remaining XRP to another account you choose, then removes yours from the ledger. It costs a special fee of 0.2 XRP, which is destroyed. So deleting an account with 1 XRP of base reserve returns about 0.8 XRP.

Some things must be cleared first. Open escrows, checks, payment channels and NFT pages block deletion. So does any trust line still on the ledger.

A deleted address is not banned. If someone sends it enough XRP later, the account is created again from scratch.

The reserve amounts can change. Validators vote on them, the same way they vote on the transaction fee. When they lowered the reserves in December 2024, locked XRP across every account became spendable at once.

AccountDelete requirements:

Sequence + 255 must be less than or equal to the current ledger index. This protects against replaying old transactions.
No deletion blockers in the owner directory. Blockers include Check, Escrow, PayChannel, RippleState and NFTokenPage.
The account owns 1,000 or fewer objects.
The transaction cost is at least one owner reserve increment, 0.2 XRP on 2026-11-10.

The Destination receives the balance. If it requires a destination tag, include one. If it has Deposit Authorization enabled, the sender must be preauthorized.

Fee voting runs on flag ledgers, every 256th ledger. Validators submit their preferred base fee, base reserve and owner reserve. Each server picks the middle value of the votes from validators it trusts. A SetFee pseudo-transaction applies the change only if it has a majority and survives consensus. Settings can change at most once per flag ledger, about every 15 minutes.

Recommended values in the docs match mainnet today: 10 drops for the reference transaction cost, 1 XRP base reserve and 0.2 XRP owner reserve.

Related: Owner reserve, Fees and burn.