Reserves (Account Reserve & Owner Reserve)
Why every XRP Ledger account must hold a minimum XRP balance, and how owning ledger objects increases that requirement.
Every account on the XRP Ledger is required to hold a minimum amount of XRP at all times. This is called the reserve requirement, and it exists to prevent the ledger's state size from growing without bound.
Why reserves exist
Every account, trust line, offer, escrow, and other object an account owns takes up space in the ledger's global state, which every validator and full-history server must store and process. Without some cost attached to creating state, the ledger would be vulnerable to being bloated with cheap, disposable accounts and objects. The reserve requirement makes creating persistent ledger state cost something real, without requiring an ongoing fee.
Reserved XRP is not spent, burned, or given to anyone — it remains the account's own XRP. It simply cannot be sent elsewhere or drop the account below the reserve threshold; in effect, it is XRP that is "locked" by the protocol rather than by the account holder's own choice.
The two components
- Base (account) reserve. A fixed minimum amount of XRP required just to have an account exist on the ledger at all.
- Owner reserve. An additional, smaller increment of XRP required for each additional object the account owns — for example, each open trust line, each active offer on the decentralized exchange, or each open escrow or payment channel.
Both figures are set by the network (via the amendment process) rather than fixed forever in the original protocol, and both have been reduced more than once over the ledger's history as the network's design matured — so always check current values via a live source (such as rippled's server info or a block explorer) rather than assuming a historical figure still applies.
Practical implications
- A brand-new account cannot be funded with less than the base reserve; sending an amount below that threshold to an unfunded address will not activate it.
- An account that wants to open many trust lines, place many offers, or hold many NFTs will need XRP above the base reserve to cover the owner reserve for each object.
- Closing an offer, trust line, or other object releases the corresponding owner reserve back to spendable balance.
This is one of the more common points of confusion for people new to the XRPL, since "my balance shows more XRP than I can actually send" is usually explained by the reserve requirement holding part of the balance in place.