Every address on the XRP Ledger must maintain a minimum XRP balance called the reserve requirement. This balance cannot be sent to others while it remains locked — it serves as collateral that prevents the ledger from being overwhelmed with empty or abandoned accounts and objects.

Current Reserve Amounts (Post-December 2024)

Following a validator vote in December 2024:

• Base Reserve: 1 XRP — the minimum required to activate and maintain any account on the ledger.
• Owner Reserve: 0.2 XRP per object — each additional item an account owns (trust lines, offers, escrows, NFT pages, etc.) adds 0.2 XRP to the reserve requirement.

Before this change, the base reserve was 10 XRP and the owner reserve was 2 XRP per object — ten times higher. The reduction made creating and maintaining XRPL accounts dramatically more affordable, especially as XRP's price had risen sharply.

What Counts Toward the Owner Reserve?

Objects that increase an account's reserve include: Offers (DEX orders), Trust Lines, Escrows, Payment Channels, Checks, Signer Lists, Tickets, NFT pages, Oracles, and Deposit Preauthorizations. When these objects are removed from the ledger, the associated reserve is returned and becomes spendable again.

How to Look Up Reserve Requirements

Use the XRPL API's server_info or server_state method to get the current reserve_base_xrp and reserve_inc_xrp values. Always look up reserve requirements dynamically rather than hardcoding them, since validator votes can change these values.