USDT Transfer Fee by Network: Cost and Time, Oct 2026

The USDT transfer fee to someone who already holds the token is a fraction of a cent on Solana, Polygon, TON and BNB Smart Chain, about 12 cents on Ethereum, and $2.15 on Tron when you have no energy of your own. A recipient who has never held USDT costs more on every network, most noticeably on Solana, where the price rises to $0.18. These are medians from our 30-day measurement of real transfers, 22 September to 21 October 2026. The numbers are true as of 22 October 2026, and the page is updated every month.

Time differs even more than price. On BNB Smart Chain and TON the block with your transfer becomes final within about a second, and on Solana, since a network upgrade on 21 October 2026, in a fraction of a second. On Polygon it takes a few seconds, on Tron about a minute, and on Ethereum about a quarter of an hour.

The fee here means what the network itself charged. A withdrawal fee that an exchange or a wallet adds on top is its own price and is not part of these numbers.

USDT transfer fees by network, compared

Here is the median cost of one direct USDT transfer, in US dollars, from our measurement of 22 September to 21 October 2026 (network data from public nodes, coin prices from CoinGecko). The first number is for a recipient who already held USDT, the second for a recipient who had none:

• Solana (USDT SPL): $0.0011, or $0.18 for a new recipient. The jump is a storage deposit for the recipient's new token account, not a network fee.
• Polygon: $0.0017, or $0.0029 for a new recipient. The network's coin is POL.
• TON: $0.0017, or $0.0033 for a new recipient. USDT here is a jetton, TON's name for a token.
• BNB Smart Chain (BEP20): $0.0018, or $0.0037 for a new recipient. Gas, the network's unit of work, is paid in BNB.
• Ethereum (ERC20): $0.12, or $0.17 for a new recipient. Most of that is a tip the sender's wallet adds, not what the network requires.
• Tron (TRC20): $2.15, or $4.36 for a new recipient. That is the price when the network burns TRX for the whole transfer; most Tron senders use energy instead and pay less.

So the cheapest USDT network depends on who you send to. If the recipient already holds USDT, Solana is cheapest at $0.0011 a transfer. If the recipient has never held USDT, Polygon is cheapest at $0.0029, and Solana climbs to $0.18.

Between the four cheap networks the difference is a fraction of a cent, and nobody will feel it. What decides more is whether the recipient accepts USDT on that network at all, because a transfer on a network they don't support never reaches them. So the choice starts with the recipient, not with the price: which USDT network suits a sender and which suits a business.

How much the fee moved over the month

The median for a recipient who already held USDT was calculated for each day of the window. Here is how far it moved from the calmest day to the busiest, 22 September to 21 October 2026:

• Tron: $2.11 to $2.22. The steadiest price of the six, for reasons explained in the Tron section.
• Ethereum: $0.089 to $0.29. The busiest day cost more than three times the calmest.
• BNB Smart Chain: $0.0013 to $0.0025.
• Polygon: $0.0013 to $0.0020.
• TON: $0.0014 to $0.0021.
• Solana: $0.00055 to $0.0025.

The fee is paid in the network's coin, not in USDT

Each network charges in its own coin, whatever token you are sending. A wallet that sends USDT needs a little of that coin as well:

• Tron: TRX.
• Ethereum: ETH.
• BNB Smart Chain: BNB.
• Polygon: POL.
• TON: GRAM, the coin's name since 15 June 2026; before that it was called Toncoin.
• Solana: SOL.

That is why the dollar figures above move with the price of these coins, not only with how busy the network is.

An ordinary wallet that holds USDT and none of the network's coin cannot send it. There are two exceptions:

• Wallets that let someone else cover the fee. A sponsor pays it, or the wallet takes the fee in USDT.
• A Tron address with energy delegated to it. If the address has energy, whether from the owner's own staked TRX or rented, and has not used up its 600 free bytes of bandwidth for the day, USDT goes out with no TRX in the wallet.

For an ordinary wallet, the reason is spelled out in why a USDT payment fails without TRX, ETH or BNB.

Why does it cost more to send USDT to a new wallet?

USDT on each network is a program that keeps a list of balances. Sending USDT asks that program to lower one number and raise another.

If the recipient is already on the list, the program changes an existing entry. If the recipient has never held USDT, the program has to write a new entry, and storing new data costs the network more than changing old data. That is why a transfer to a new recipient costs more on every network, though not by the same amount:

• TON, BNB Smart Chain and Tron: about twice as much. For example, $2.15 becomes $4.36 on Tron.
• Polygon: about 1.7 times as much. The median goes from $0.0017 to $0.0029.
• Ethereum: about 40% more. The median goes from $0.12 to $0.17.

Two networks do it their own way:

• TON gives every USDT holder a separate small wallet for the token. If the recipient has none, the transfer creates it along the way, and that roughly doubles the median cost from $0.0017 to $0.0033.
• Solana needs a token account for the recipient. Creating one locks a storage deposit, which is why the median jumps from $0.0011 to $0.18. The deposit is not a network fee: it stays on the recipient's new account (details in the Solana section).

How long does a USDT transfer take on each network?

Two numbers describe the wait:

• How often the network makes a block. Your transfer shows up in one of the next blocks, so this is the shortest wait you can get.
• How long until the block is final. After that the network no longer reverses it, and careful recipients wait for this moment.

Here is what we measured: the block interval is the average over 22 September to 21 October 2026, and finality is the median of 10 checks against public nodes, taken on 22 October 2026 (on TON, spread across the window, one every third day).

• BNB Smart Chain: a block every 0.45 seconds, final in under a second. Our checks gave 0 to 1 second.
• TON: a block every 0.4 seconds, final within 1 second.
• Polygon: a block every 1.5 seconds, final in about 3 seconds.
• Solana: a slot (Solana's word for a block) every 0.24 seconds, final in about 0.2 seconds.
• Tron: a block every 3 seconds, final in about 55 seconds.
• Ethereum: a block every 12 seconds, final in about 15 minutes (912 seconds).

Solana changed how it reaches finality right at the end of our window. On 21 October 2026 it switched on Votor, the voting part of its Alpenglow upgrade, which aims for roughly 150 milliseconds to finality, against about 12.8 seconds under the old mechanism. Our checks on 22 October ran under the new one, but for almost the whole window transfers were finalized the old way. Slots got shorter during the window too: the network's target slot time was 250 milliseconds from 18 September and 200 milliseconds from 9 October 2026, so the 0.24-second average mixes the two.

These are the network's own times. Two waits on top of them are not measured here:

• The recipient's confirmations. An exchange can wait for its own number of blocks before crediting you.
• The exchange's queue. A withdrawal from an exchange can sit there before it reaches the network at all.

If the money doesn't show up, the transfer's hash (TXID) tells you whether it made it into a block and on which network, and you can follow the steps in how to check a crypto payment by TXID, network and amount.

TRC20 fee: why is a USDT transfer on Tron so expensive?

Tron does not charge in coins directly. A USDT transfer uses up two resources:

• Energy. It pays for running the USDT program.
• Bandwidth. It pays for the bytes of the transaction.

If your address has energy, the transfer spends it. If it has none, the network burns TRX instead, at 100 sun per unit of energy, where 1 TRX is 1,000,000 sun.

Here is what 3,582 transfers read from Tron's public API (TronGrid) showed:

• A transfer uses 64,285 units of energy. To a recipient who has never held USDT it uses 130,285.
• Without energy of your own, the network burns 6.4285 TRX. That was a median of $2.15 at the TRX price of the hour; for a new recipient it burns 13.0285 TRX, a median of $4.36.
• Most of that energy is a surcharge. Tron adds a surcharge to its busiest programs, and for USDT it made up 77.2% of a transfer's energy: without it the transfer would need 14,650 units, or 29,650 for a new recipient.
• The surcharge is at its ceiling. On 22 October 2026 USDT's surcharge factor stood at 3.4, the highest the network allows; Tron recalculates it every 6 hours.
• Bandwidth is free for about one transfer a day. A transfer takes 345 bytes, each address gets 600 bytes a day for free, and beyond that the network burns another 0.345 TRX.

So Tron is expensive not because it is busy at a given moment but because it charges a fixed surcharge on the program everyone uses. That is also why its price barely moved during the month.

In practice few people pay the full burn. Here is how the transfers in our sample paid for energy:

• 89.4% burned no TRX for energy. Their own staked or rented energy covered the whole transfer.
• 1.7% ran short. They spent the energy they had, and the network burned TRX for the rest.
• 8.9% paid everything by burning TRX. They had no energy of their own.

What the rental cost is not visible on the chain, so we can't put a number on it.

And 48.3% of transfers burned no TRX at all, neither for energy nor for bandwidth.

If you have no energy, the wallet will want enough TRX for the burn before it sends anything; the amounts and the ways around it are in how much TRX a USDT transfer needs and what to do when you are short.

ERC20 fee: what a USDT transfer on Ethereum costs

On Ethereum the price of a transfer has two parts:

• The base fee. It is what the network itself requires, and the network burns it.
• The priority fee. It is a tip to the validator who adds the block, and the sender's wallet sets it.

Here is what 3,600 transfers read from a public Ethereum node (PublicNode) showed:

• A median of $0.12 per transfer. To a new recipient it was $0.17; across all transfers, $0.14.
• A wide spread. Among transfers to recipients who already held USDT, the middle half cost $0.052 to $0.25, one in ten cost under $0.020, and one in ten cost over $0.33.
• The base fee alone was small. Its median was 0.102 gwei per unit of gas (a gwei is a billionth of an ETH), and a transfer at the base fee alone would have cost a median $0.013.
• The tip was most of the price. The priority fee made up a median 82.5% of what senders paid.

In other words, most of the ERC20 fee in these weeks was the tip that wallets add by default to get a transfer in quickly. Some wallets let you set a lower tip; the cost of doing that is a longer wait if the network gets busy. About 39.9% of the transfers went to recipients who had never held USDT.

BEP20 fee: what a USDT transfer on BNB Smart Chain costs

BNB Smart Chain works like Ethereum, with gas paid in BNB, but its gas price is far lower. Here is what 3,598 transfers read from public BNB Smart Chain nodes (PublicNode and BNB Chain's own) showed:

• A median of $0.0018 per transfer. To a new recipient it was $0.0037; across all transfers, $0.0022.
• A low gas price. The median was 0.07 gwei.
• Some transfers paid nothing. 6.6% of the sample went through at a zero gas price.

A zero price means someone else paid. BNB Chain lets a wallet hand a transfer to a sponsor, called a paymaster, which covers the cost for the user. About 35.8% of the transfers went to new recipients.

Polygon network fee: what a USDT transfer costs there

Polygon also works like Ethereum, with gas paid in POL. Here is what 3,593 transfers read from a public Polygon node (PublicNode) showed:

• A median of $0.0017 per transfer. To a new recipient it was $0.0029; across all transfers, $0.0017.
• Most of it is what the network requires. A transfer at the base fee alone would have cost a median $0.0013, and the tip made up a median 23.3% of the price.

One detail for anyone looking the token up: as of 22 October 2026 the USDT contract on Polygon gives its symbol as USDT0, so wallets and explorers that read the name from the contract show it that way. About 19.8% of the transfers went to new recipients.

TON network fee: what a USDT transfer costs there

USDT on TON moves as a chain of messages between small wallets, one per holder. The sender attaches a little GRAM to pay for that chain; the network takes its fees, and the rest comes back. More on how the network is built is in how the TON network works and what sending money on it costs.

Here is what 539 transfers read from TON's public APIs (Toncenter and TonAPI) showed:

• A median of $0.0017 per transfer. That is what left the sender's wallet minus the leftover GRAM that was returned.
• $0.0033 when the recipient had no USDT wallet yet. The transfer creates one on the way; 9.5% of the sample did.
• A median of 0.00118 GRAM in network fees. That covers the whole chain of messages.
• The change doesn't always return to the sender. In 74.0% of transfers the leftover GRAM went back to the sender, in the rest to the recipient.

Solana network fee: what a USDT transfer costs there

Solana charges a base fee of 5,000 lamports (billionths of a SOL) per signature, and the sender can add a priority fee on top. Here is what 277 transfers read from public Solana endpoints (Solana's own and Tatum's) showed:

• A median of $0.0011 per transfer when the recipient's token account already existed.
• A median of 0.000010 SOL in network fees. 34.3% of transfers paid only the base fee, with no priority fee.
• $0.18 when a new token account was created. The difference is a storage deposit that stays on the recipient's account; 5.1% of the sample paid it.

The deposit did not change during the window. Of the 14 sampled transfers that created an account, 12, made between 23 September and 19 October 2026, locked exactly 0.00148844 SOL, which cost the payer a median $0.18; the other 2 debited the payer an unusual amount and are left out of that figure. It rests on only 12 transfers, so treat it as a close estimate rather than a precise price.

That deposit comes out of the payer's SOL, so a Solana wallet that easily covers ordinary transfers can still come up short on a first transfer to someone new. If you are about to send on this network yourself, it helps to know how much SOL to keep next to USDT on Solana.

Is there any way to send USDT with no fee at all?

On the chain, someone always pays. What changes is who, and when. There are three ways a sender ends up paying nothing at the moment of sending:

• Transfers inside one exchange. When both accounts sit on the same exchange, the transfer usually never touches the network, so there is no network fee; the exchange's own rules apply.
• Your own energy on Tron. 48.3% of Tron transfers burned no TRX, but the energy came from TRX locked in staking or from a paid rental.
• A sponsored transfer. On BNB Smart Chain 6.6% of transfers went through at a zero gas price because a sponsor covered them.

Paying a store adds another fee to think about: the one the store's payment service charges, besides the network's.

In the CryptumPay checkout window the payer picks the coin and then the network, and USDT is accepted on several networks. If the merchant has passed the fee on to the customer, the CryptumPay window shows it as a separate line before payment, so the payer sees the full amount before sending. On Tron the service pays for its own leg of the payment, servicing the one-time deposit address, with rented energy, so its transfer fee there is lower than the same transfer would cost by burning TRX; the network fee for sending from the payer's own wallet is still paid by that wallet. On the merchant's side, CryptumPay converts incoming payments to USDT as soon as they arrive; more on this in what crypto payment processing costs a business.

How these numbers were obtained

We read real transfers straight from each network, not from price lists. Every 4 hours for 30 full days, 22 September to 21 October 2026, we took the block closest to that moment and the blocks after it, and recorded the USDT transfers in them. That makes 180 moments per network. Five networks had data at all 180; public Solana nodes no longer serve blocks from 22 September, so the Solana sample starts on 23 September and covers 174 of them.

Only plain transfers of USDT from one address to another count. Three kinds of transactions are left out, because their cost says nothing about sending USDT:

• Swaps. A trade of one token for another.
• Batch payouts. One transaction that pays many recipients at once.
• Transfers made through other programs. USDT moved as one step inside some other program's work.

At each moment we took up to 20 transfers; on Solana we read 2 blocks, and on TON up to 3 transfers. The samples came out like this:

• Tron: 3,582 transfers, from TronGrid.
• Ethereum: 3,600 transfers, from PublicNode.
• BNB Smart Chain: 3,598 transfers, from PublicNode and BNB Chain's public nodes.
• Polygon: 3,593 transfers, from PublicNode.
• TON: 539 transfers, from Toncenter and TonAPI.
• Solana: 277 transfers, from Solana's public endpoint and Tatum.

The cost of each transfer is what the network charged, in its own coin. We turned it into dollars at the coin's price in the hour of the transfer, using CoinGecko's hourly prices. For reference, here are the median coin prices over the window:

• TRX: $0.334.
• ETH: $2,610.
• BNB: $761.62.
• POL: $0.103.
• GRAM: $1.44.
• SOL: $115.11.

Every cost in the article is a median: half the transfers cost less, half cost more. We use the median because a few unusually expensive transfers would pull an average up and paint a picture nobody actually pays.

The block interval is the average over the window, taken from the first and last block numbers and the time between them. Finality was checked 10 times per network on 22 October 2026, by asking a node how far its final block lags behind its newest one. TON works differently, so there we checked how soon a block with transfers is committed to the network's main chain, 10 times across the window, one every third day.

Every transfer is recorded with its hash, so each number here traces back to specific transactions on the chain. The measurement is repeated every month, and this page is updated with it.

What it comes down to

To a recipient who already holds USDT, a transfer costs well under a cent on Solana, Polygon, TON and BNB Smart Chain, about 12 cents on Ethereum, and $2.15 on Tron if you burn TRX, as of 22 October 2026. A recipient who has never held USDT raises the price everywhere, from about 40% more on Ethereum to about double on TON, BNB Smart Chain and Tron, and to $0.18 on Solana. The fastest networks finish a transfer in seconds, Tron in about a minute, Ethereum in about a quarter of an hour. On Tron most of the price is a surcharge on the USDT program, and on Ethereum most of it is the tip your wallet chooses.

Questions and answers

How many confirmations does a USDT transfer need, and how many on TRC20?

The network itself doesn't set a number: the service receiving the money decides how many blocks to wait for. On Tron a block is considered final, or "solidified", once it sits about 19 blocks behind the newest one; in our checks on 22 October 2026 that was 18 to 19 blocks, about 55 seconds. An exchange may ask for more before it credits you.

Is TRC20 faster than ERC20?

Yes, on both counts we measured. Tron makes a block every 3 seconds and finalizes it in about 55 seconds, while Ethereum makes one every 12 seconds and finalizes in about 15 minutes. On price it is the other way round: in the same month an ERC20 transfer cost a median $0.12 against $2.15 for a TRC20 transfer that burns TRX.

What is energy on Tron, and can you rent it for a TRC20 transfer?

Energy is the resource Tron spends on running programs, and a USDT transfer is a call to one. You get it by staking TRX: staked TRX gives your address a daily supply of energy that refills over 24 hours. Someone who has staked can also lend energy to another address, and rental services sell exactly that for a fee in TRX. In our sample 91.1% of transfers used staked or rented energy, but the rental price itself is not visible on the chain.

Can you send USDT without holding any ETH?

From your own wallet, usually not: an ERC20 transfer pays for gas in ETH, and with no ETH the wallet won't send. Two routes get around it:

• Withdraw from an exchange. The exchange pays the ETH itself and charges you its own withdrawal fee instead.
• Use a wallet with sponsored sending. A third party pays the ETH, and the wallet either takes that cost from you in USDT or covers it itself.