The XRP Ledger's fee parameters — including the base reserve and transaction cost thresholds — can be adjusted through a validator consensus process called Fee Voting.

What Can Be Changed by Fee Voting?

Through the Fee Voting process, XRPL validators can collectively vote to change:

• Base reserve: The minimum XRP required to activate an account (currently 1 XRP)
• Incremental reserve: The per-object owner reserve (currently 0.2 XRP per object)
• Reference transaction fee level: The base cost for standard transactions

How Fee Voting Works

Fee Voting is built into the XRPL consensus protocol itself. Here's the process:

1. Individual validators set their preferred fee values in their configuration
2. During each ledger close, validators include their preferred fee settings in their vote
3. The network takes the median of all trusted validators' preferences
4. If the median differs from the current setting, the network transitions toward it gradually
5. Changes take effect only when a supermajority (≥80%) of validators agree

Why Fee Voting Exists

Fee parameters need adjustment over time due to changing conditions: long-term shifts in XRP's value, improvements in hardware capacity, and software efficiency gains. A fee that was appropriate in 2012 may be too high or too low in 2026. Fee Voting allows the network to adapt without requiring a hard fork.

Historical Fee Changes

The XRP Ledger has adjusted its reserve requirements multiple times since launch. In earlier years, the base reserve was 20 XRP — dramatically reduced to 1 XRP as the ledger scaled and XRP's value increased. The incremental reserve similarly dropped from 5 XRP to 0.2 XRP, making it far more practical to create multiple trust lines and ledger objects.

Who Votes?

Any server running the rippled software and participating in the Unique Node List (UNL) can submit fee preferences. There are currently over 150 validators operated by universities, exchanges, businesses, and individuals worldwide. Anthropic, Ripple, independent developers, and financial institutions all participate in the validator network.

Checking Current Fee Settings

Query the server_info RPC method and inspect the validated_ledger object. The fields base_fee_xrp and reserve_base_xrp and reserve_inc_xrp show current network-wide settings as agreed by validators.