A refund counter follows specific rules and is capped.
LET’S PICTURE IT
A recycling credit can reduce part of a bill under a policy. It is not a promise that any discarded item pays back the entire purchase.
SEE IT FOR YOURSELF
Calculate and split a manual execution feeStep 1 / 4
This example supplies twenty-one thousand gas used. It is a simple teaching input, not a live estimate of a contract call.
This example supplies twenty-one thousand gas used. It is a simple teaching input, not a live estimate of a contract call.With base ten Gwei, priority cap two and total cap twenty, the effective rate is twelve Gwei per gas.Twenty-one thousand times twelve Gwei gives two hundred fifty-two thousand Gwei, or 0.000252 ETH.The base-fee component is 0.00021 ETH and is burned. The priority component is 0.000042 ETH for the block fee recipient.
Animated local teaching model. No wallet, RPC or live blockchain data. Some labels and hashes are abbreviated for readability.
Refunds are protocol accounting
Particular state operations can affect a gas refund counter under the active rules. This differs from unused gas allowance and from an application sending a user an ETH refund.
Clearing storage is not unlimited reimbursement
The refund depends on the original and changed state and the governing EIPs. A transaction cannot assume every cleared slot creates a freely spendable gas token or unlimited negative cost.
The cap matters
EIP-3529 reduced refund allowances and limited the maximum refund relative to consumed gas. It also removed the old SELFDESTRUCT refund. Later protocol context should be checked before relying on historical examples.
Use the right source for exact metering
The manual fee calculator expects accounted gas used; it does not reconstruct refund counters from Solidity source. Detailed gas analysis needs the applicable execution rules and actual state transitions.