LND Channel Rebalancing Strategies -- Keep Routing Fees Flowing

Channel rebalancing moves liquidity from outbound-heavy channels to inbound-heavy ones, keeping your node able to route payments in both directions.

Why Rebalance?

If all liquidity is on one side, you cannot route payments that direction. Rebalancing restores bidirectional capacity and routing fee revenue.

Manual Circular Rebalance via lncli

# Pay yourself through a circular route
lncli payinvoice --fee_limit_sat 100 $(lncli addinvoice --amt 100000 | jq -r .payment_request) --last_hop <target_chan_id>

Using balance-of-satoshis (bos)

# Install bos
npm install -g balanceofsatoshis

# Rebalance 100k sats, max 0.1% fee
bos rebalance --out <out_peer_pubkey> --in <in_peer_pubkey> --amount 100000 --max-fee-rate 100

Using LND AutoRebalancer Tools

Tools like charge-lnd and rebalance-lnd run continuously and rebalance based on thresholds:

# rebalance-lnd example
python rebalance.py -l 0.0001 -a 500000

Key Parameters

- --max-fee-rate: maximum ppm (parts per million) you will pay for rebalancing

- --amount: satoshis to move

- --out / --in: which channels to drain/fill

Cost vs Benefit

Only rebalance if expected routing fee revenue exceeds rebalancing cost. Paying 500 ppm to rebalance a low-traffic channel loses money. Focus on high-traffic routes.