To send USDT on TRON from your own wallet you need about 6.8 TRX if the recipient already holds USDT, and about 13.4 TRX if the recipient holds none — measured on 26 September 2026 for a wallet with no staked resources and no free bandwidth left. The amount of USDT does not matter: sending 5 USDT and 5,000 USDT costs the same. What changes the price is whether the address you are paying has held USDT before. The network fee is paid in TRX from your own wallet; Blomo Wallet does not rent energy or pay the fee for you, so a wallet with USDT and no TRX cannot send.
The two numbers
A USDT transfer on TRON is a call to the USDT contract. It burns two resources: energy, for running the contract, and bandwidth, for the bytes of the transaction. If your wallet has none of either, the network burns TRX to cover them.
Measured on 26 September 2026 from the public TronGrid API:
| Recipient already holds USDT | Recipient holds no USDT | |
|---|---|---|
| Energy used | 64,285 | 130,285 |
Energy price (getEnergyFee) |
100 sun | 100 sun |
| Energy cost | 6.4285 TRX | 13.0285 TRX |
| Bandwidth, 345 bytes at 1,000 sun | 0.345 TRX | 0.345 TRX |
| Total, nothing staked | ~6.77 TRX | ~13.37 TRX |
| In dollars, TRX at $0.336136 | ~$2.28 | ~$4.50 |
Where each number came from:
- Energy used: every successful USDT
transferin TRON blocks 86,590,923 to 86,590,927, read through TronGrid on 26 September 2026. There were 466 of them: 401 used exactly 64,285 energy and 65 used exactly 130,285. Nothing in between. The same two figures were measured on 13 September 2026 for what a top-up costs. - Energy price: the
getEnergyFeechain parameter fromwallet/getchainparameters, 26 September 2026: 100 sun, which is 0.0001 TRX per unit of energy. One TRX is a million sun. - Bandwidth price: the
getTransactionFeechain parameter the same day: 1,000 sun per byte. In the same five blocks, 133 USDT transfers paid exactly 345,000 sun (0.345 TRX) for bandwidth 330 paid nothing and the remaining 3 paid between 346,000 and 348,000 sun, which accounts for all 466. - TRX price: $0.336136, from the CoinGecko API (
simple/price), 17:54 UTC on 26 September 2026. CoinGecko’s daily price for that date is $0.3381.
Why a new recipient costs twice as much
The USDT contract keeps one balance per address. Adding to a balance that already exists is cheap; writing a balance where there was none costs roughly twice the energy. The recipient’s address is what decides it, not yours and not the amount.
You rarely know which branch you are on before you send. An address that has received USDT before is on the cheap branch; a fresh address — a new exchange deposit address, a Blomo top-up address, someone’s newly created wallet — is on the expensive one. A block explorer such as Tronscan shows whether an address holds USDT. Budget for about 13.4 TRX unless you know the recipient already holds USDT.
A Blomo top-up is always the expensive branch: Blomo issues a new address for every top-up request and never reuses one. What a 100 USDT top-up costs works that case through end to end.
What makes it cheaper
- Free bandwidth. The network gives every account a free bandwidth allowance. TRON’s documentation says, read on 26 September 2026: “each account can use up to 600 free Bandwidth over a rolling 24-hour window”. A USDT transfer is 345 bytes, so one transfer a day fits inside it and the 0.345 TRX goes away. The second one that day pays.
- Staked TRX. TRX staked for energy or bandwidth covers those resources before any TRX is burned. The same page: “Energy has no free quota — accounts must either stake (or receive delegated) TRX to obtain it, or rely on the TRX-burn fallback.”
Blomo Wallet takes both into account when it estimates: free and staked bandwidth, and your own staked energy, are subtracted before it prices the rest. It does not stake for you and does not rent energy.
Activation: when the extra 1.1 TRX applies
A TRON address does not exist on chain until something activates it. TRON’s account page, read on 26 September 2026, says a new address is activated by sending it “any amount of TRX or a TRC-10 token”, and: “The sending account pays an account creation fee of 1 TRX ( getCreateNewAccountFeeInSystemContract ). If the sender does not hold enough Bandwidth, an additional 0.1 TRX ( getCreateAccountFee ) is burned to cover the Bandwidth shortfall.” On 26 September 2026 those two parameters were 1,000,000 sun and 100,000 sun: 1.1 TRX together.
What that means for a wallet:
- Sending USDT to a new address costs the 130,285-energy price above. TRON’s list of what activates an address names TRX and TRC-10 transfers; USDT is a TRC-20 token and is not on it.
- Sending TRX to a new address costs the activation. Blomo Wallet counts the full 1.1 TRX in that case, plus bandwidth, so its estimate is on the safe side.
- Your own wallet has never received TRX. A wallet that has only ever received USDT is not activated and cannot send anything. It needs TRX first, and the activation fee is paid by whoever sends you that TRX, not by you.
How Blomo Wallet estimates the fee
The estimate in Blomo Wallet comes from the network, not from a table:
- For an activated wallet, the network runs the exact transfer as a dry run before anything is signed and reports the energy it would use. That figure already knows whether the recipient holds USDT. Blomo Wallet multiplies it by the current
getEnergyFee, adds bandwidth if your free allowance is used up, and shows the total in TRX. - If the dry run fails, Blomo Wallet refuses to send, instead of signing a transfer that would burn TRX and fail on chain.
- If your wallet is not activated yet, the network gives no estimate. Blomo Wallet then names a top-up of about 14.45 TRX at the 26 September 2026 price: an energy budget of 130,000 units and 345 bytes of bandwidth, plus 1.1 TRX. Since the activation itself is paid by whoever sends you the TRX, that 1.1 TRX is a margin: if the sender pays the activation, it stays in your wallet. Once the wallet is activated, the next estimate comes from the dry run.
- If you do not have enough TRX, the send screen says how much you need, in TRX.
One more detail: the Max button on the send screen, for USDT, sends the whole USDT balance — the fee is paid separately in TRX, so the TRX has to be there as well.
Every network has its own fee coin
The same rule holds on every network Blomo Wallet supports: the fee is paid in that network’s own coin, never in the token you send.
| Network | Fee paid in |
|---|---|
| TRON | TRX |
| Ethereum | ETH |
| Arbitrum | ETH — not ARB |
| BNB Chain | BNB |
| Bitcoin | BTC |
On Arbitrum, Blomo Wallet’s own fee estimate for a USDC transfer on 27 September 2026 was 49,281 gas, about 0.0000021 ETH. That was an estimate; no transfer was sent. Blomo Wallet shows ETH on Arbitrum because that is what pays the fee there. ETH on Arbitrum is a wallet asset only: it cannot be used to top up a Blomo card balance.
For a network’s own coin, the Max button sends the balance minus the estimated fee, so the transfer does not fail for lack of gas.
Before you press Send
- Keep at least 13.4 TRX in an activated wallet if you send USDT to addresses you do not know: that covers one transfer to a new recipient at the 26 September 2026 price. A wallet that is not activated yet will be asked for about 14.45 TRX, the 1.1 TRX margin included.
- Check the address and the network. A USDT transfer on TRON cannot be reversed by anyone, Blomo included.
- Read the fee on the confirmation screen. It is the network’s own figure for that exact transfer, which beats any number in an article, this one included.
Quick answers
How much TRX do I need to send USDT? About 6.8 TRX if the recipient already holds USDT and about 13.4 TRX if not, on 26 September 2026, with nothing staked and no free bandwidth left.
Does sending more USDT cost more TRX? No. The energy depends on the recipient’s state, not on the amount.
Why did my transfer cost twice what my friend’s did? Your recipient held no USDT, so the contract wrote a new balance: 130,285 energy instead of 64,285.
Can I pay the TRON fee in USDT? Not from Blomo Wallet. The network fee is paid in TRX from your wallet, and Blomo Wallet does not rent energy or cover the fee.
Do I pay 1.1 TRX to activate the recipient? Only when you send TRX to an address that has never been activated. A USDT transfer to a new address costs the higher energy figure instead.
Why can’t my wallet send USDT when it holds USDT? It has no TRX for the fee, or it has never received TRX and is not activated yet. Send TRX to it first.
What pays the fee on Arbitrum? ETH on Arbitrum. ARB does not pay gas.
Read on
- TRC-20 or ERC-20: what a 100 USDT top-up costs — the same energy figures applied to a Blomo top-up, with Ethereum alongside.
- Blomo Wallet — how the non-custodial wallet differs from the Blomo balance.
- Imported your phrase and the balance is zero? — when a wallet shows a different address from the one you expected.