Guides
  1. How TRON Works
  2. Resource Model

Bandwidth and Energy

TRON's two metering resources — Bandwidth for transaction byte size and Energy for smart contract execution — and how to obtain each.

TRON meters on-chain operations through two system resources. Bandwidth covers the byte size of every transaction stored on-chain, so it scales with how big the transaction is. Energy covers smart contract execution, so it scales with how much computation a contract performs. Both can be obtained by staking TRX and recover continuously over a rolling 24-hour window. Bandwidth also has a per-account free quota; Energy does not.

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Prerequisites

Quick comparison

AspectBandwidthEnergy
Pays forTransaction byte sizeSmart contract execution (TVM instructions)
Current network-wide limit43,200,000,000 Bandwidth180,000,000,000 Energy
Current free quota600 Bandwidth per rolling 24-hour window per accountNone
Obtained byStaking TRX, or receiving delegated Bandwidth from another accountStaking TRX, or receiving delegated Energy from another account
Recovery24-hour rolling cycle24-hour rolling cycle

When stake plus the free quota are insufficient, TRX is burned to cover the shortfall. The burn rates and the deployer Energy sharing mechanism are covered in Paying for resources & Energy sharing.

Bandwidth

Every transaction on TRON except read-only queries consumes Bandwidth. A transaction's Bandwidth consumption equals its byte size on-chain — one byte uses one Bandwidth. The current per-account free quota is 600 Bandwidth per rolling 24-hour window. This value is controlled by chain parameter getFreeNetLimit; query wallet/getchainparameters before relying on it.

For higher throughput, accounts stake TRX for Bandwidth. The current network-wide Bandwidth limit is 43,200,000,000 and is distributed proportionally to staked balances. This value is controlled by chain parameter getTotalNetLimit; query wallet/getchainparameters before relying on it:

Bandwidth obtained
  = (your TRX staked for Bandwidth / total TRX staked for Bandwidth network-wide)
  × 43_200_000_000

Query the network-wide total via wallet/getaccountresource.

Energy

Smart contract execution on TRON consumes Energy. Each TRON Virtual Machine (TVM) instruction has a fixed Energy cost, and a contract call's total Energy consumption equals the sum of those costs. Unlike Bandwidth, Energy has no free quota — every account that calls a smart contract must either have staked Energy in advance, receive delegated Energy, or rely on the TRX-burn fallback.

The current network-wide Energy limit is 180,000,000,000 and is distributed proportionally to stake. This value is controlled by getTotalEnergyCurrentLimit (and related adaptive-Energy parameters); query wallet/getchainparameters before relying on it:

Energy obtained
  = (your TRX staked for Energy / total TRX staked for Energy network-wide)
  × 180_000_000_000

Staking TRX for resources

Send a FreezeBalanceV2Contract transaction to stake TRX for either resource. Build the unsigned transaction with the wallet/freezebalancev2 HTTP API:

BASE_URL=https://api.shasta.trongrid.io   # example — replace with any TRON node (TronGrid, third-party, or self-hosted)
curl -X POST ${BASE_URL}/wallet/freezebalancev2 \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "owner_address": "TBRmnXKMEVfQ8XeQA2NroC9cGi77TvPbNb",
    "frozen_balance": 1000000,
    "resource": "BANDWIDTH",
    "visible": true
  }'

The fields:

  • owner_address — the staking account, in Base58Check (visible: true) or hex.
  • frozen_balance — amount in sun (1,000,000 sun = 1 TRX).
  • resource — "BANDWIDTH" or "ENERGY". Set to "ENERGY" to stake for Energy instead.

The response is an unsigned transaction. Sign it with the owner's private key and broadcast via wallet/broadcasttransaction. For the end-to-end build / sign / broadcast pattern, see the Stake & Delegate Resources recipe.

Staking is reversible. To recover the underlying TRX, send UnfreezeBalanceV2Contract to start a 14-day waiting period, then WithdrawExpireUnfreezeContract to claim the unstaked TRX. For the full lifecycle, see Staking on the TRON network.

Delegating resources

An account can delegate its earned Bandwidth or Energy to another account through DelegateResourceContract. The receiving account uses the delegated resource directly without staking itself. Delegation is reversible and supports an optional lock period for added safety. CEXs and DApp operators commonly use this mechanism to absorb resource costs on behalf of their users from a single staking pool.

In practice, Energy delegation is more common than Bandwidth delegation: the current free Bandwidth quota covers many everyday transfers, while Energy has no free tier and contract calls can quickly exhaust an account's available resources.

Recovery cycle

Bandwidth usage and staked Energy usage decay over a rolling 24-hour window. If no additional resource is consumed, an amount used at one time is fully recovered after 24 hours. New consumption is combined with the unrecovered usage and recalculates the recovery schedule, so the available amount depends on the account's activity throughout the window.

Related resources

Updated 9 days ago