Sending and receiving Monero
Moving Monero is simple once you know two things: use a fresh subaddress to receive, and expect about twenty minutes before new funds are spendable. Everything else is detail, and this covers the parts that cost people money.
- To receive: copy a fresh subaddress from your wallet (it starts with 8) and share it. No payment ID needed for personal payments.
- To send: paste the address, check the first and last characters, pick "normal" priority, and broadcast.
- To spend what you received: wait for 10 confirmations, roughly 20 minutes. Until then it shows as locked.
On this page
How Monero addresses work
You'll run into three kinds of address. You only ever create the first two, and almost always the subaddress.
| Type | Starts with | Length | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary address | 4 | 95 chars | Your wallet's main address. Works, but reusing it everywhere is a privacy leak. |
| Subaddress | 8 | 95 chars | The recommended way to receive. Make a fresh one per payer. |
| Integrated address | 4 | 106 chars | A standard address with a payment ID baked in. Mostly for businesses and exchanges. |
All of them come from your one seed, so extra subaddresses don't mean extra backups. The keys inside never leave your wallet; the address is just your account number.
How to receive Monero
Open your wallet, copy a fresh subaddress (or show its QR code), and give it to whoever is paying you. That's it. Making a new subaddress for each payer is the one privacy habit worth keeping, because subaddresses are unlinkable: an outsider looking at two of them can't tell they belong to the same wallet. Reusing one address for everything lets anyone who has it see all the payments to it.
Watch it land in your own wallet. Because Monero is private, you can't paste a transaction ID into a public explorer and confirm it hit your address, the way you can with Bitcoin. So don't accept a screenshot or a bare transaction ID as proof. If you can't see it yet and need certainty, ask the sender for a transaction proof (see below).
Payment IDs and exchanges
Payment IDs are a legacy feature. The old long ones were removed back in 2019, and for normal wallet-to-wallet payments you never touch one. The single place a regular person still meets a payment ID is depositing to an exchange, where many exchanges share one address across all customers and use the payment ID to tell deposits apart.
If an exchange gives you a deposit address and a separate payment ID, you must paste the payment ID into the payment-ID field exactly. Skip it or get it wrong and your coins reach the exchange but aren't credited to your account. Recovering them means a support ticket and a manual process that isn't guaranteed. If the exchange instead gives you an integrated address (the 106-character kind), the ID is already inside it and you don't need a separate field.
How to send Monero
- Paste the recipient's address and check the first and last handful of characters against what they gave you. Clipboard-hijacking malware swaps in its own address, and Monero sends can't be reversed.
- Enter the amount, and add the payment ID only if an exchange asked for one.
- Pick a priority. "Normal" is right almost always (more on this below).
- Review and broadcast. The transaction goes to the mempool as "pending," then gets mined into a block, usually within a couple of minutes.
Confirmations and unlock time
Two stages, and mixing them up is the most common source of "my Monero is stuck" panic. A payment is received after about one confirmation (~2 minutes), but it isn't spendable until 10 confirmations, roughly 20 minutes. That's why wallets show a total balance and a separate unlocked balance. The gap is just funds maturing, working exactly as designed.
Transaction checker → Paste a txid to watch it go from the mempool to confirmed, and see exactly when the coins become spendable.
| Confirmations | Time | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ~2 min | Received, visible, still locked |
| 10 | ~20 min | Unlocked and spendable |
| 60 | ~2 hours | Mined (coinbase) coins unlock |
Two caveats. Exchanges set their own deposit requirements and often want more than 10 confirmations. And in 2025 the network saw some unusually deep reorganizations, so for large amounts it's reasonable to wait for extra confirmations and to trust your exchange's stated number rather than assuming "10 and done." For everyday small payments, none of this changes anything.
Fees and priority
Monero fees are tiny, usually a fraction of a cent, and they scale with the transaction's size in bytes, not the amount you send. Sending $5 or $5,000 costs about the same.
Priority (the levels are roughly unimportant, normal, elevated, priority) buys you a better spot in the queue when the network is busy. It does not make a block arrive faster, because blocks come about every two minutes regardless. Monero's block size adjusts to demand, so fees rarely spike the way they do on Bitcoin or Ethereum. Use normal unless you're racing an exchange's deposit window during a backlog.
Proving a payment
Since no one can read a Monero transaction from the outside, the sender's wallet holds the receipt. There are a few kinds, and they prove different things:
- Transaction proof ("I sent this amount to this address"): the sender shares a tx key or a signed tx proof. The recipient or a third party can verify it against the address.
- Spend proof ("I spent funds in this transaction"), without revealing the recipient.
- Reserve proof ("I control at least this much"), to show a balance.
Two limits. A transaction proof shows funds were directed to an address; it does not prove they're still there and spendable (they could be locked or already spent). And your view key is not a good way to "prove" a single payment, since it reveals every incoming transaction and can't be un-shared. Prefer a targeted tx proof.
Common problems and fixes
- "I can't spend my balance." It's locked for ~20 minutes after arriving. Watch the unlocked balance and wait.
- "My transaction is stuck at 0 confirmations." Usually your wallet isn't fully synced (the transaction is fine on-chain, your wallet just hasn't caught up), or you're on a slow remote node. Let it finish syncing, or switch nodes.
- "I sent to an exchange and nothing showed up." Almost always a missing or wrong payment ID. Open a support ticket with the transaction ID and a tx proof.
- "Is their screenshot proof they paid me?" No. Confirm it in your own wallet, or ask for a transaction proof.
One last thing: ignore any "Monero support number" or refund page you find in search. Those are scams. Real help is at getmonero.org, the r/Monero community, and the Monero Stack Exchange.