LND Circular Rebalancing - Fix No Route and Fee Errors

What Is LND Circular Rebalancing?

Circular rebalancing sends a payment that routes out one channel and back through another, redistributing liquidity without closing channels. Essential for routing node operators.

Common Errors

• no route found for circular rebalance
• insufficient local balance to initiate rebalance
• FAILURE_REASON_NO_ROUTE: rebalance failed
• fee too high for rebalance to be profitable

Manual Circular Rebalance via lncli

# Create a self-payment invoice
lncli addinvoice --amt 100000

# Pay it via specific outgoing channel
lncli payinvoice --outgoing_chan_id <chan_id> <payment_request>

# Force a specific route
lncli buildroute --amt 100000 --hops <hop1>,<hop2>,<your_node>
lncli sendtoroute --payment_hash <hash> --routes <route_json>

Use balance-of-satoshis (bos)

# Install bos
npm install -g balanceofsatoshis

# Rebalance: move 500k sats from chan A to chan B
bos rebalance \
  --out <outgoing_peer_pubkey> \
  --in <incoming_peer_pubkey> \
  --amount 500000 \
  --max-fee-rate 500

Use lndmanage

pip install lndmanage
lndmanage rebalance --outgoing-channel <chan_id> --incoming-channel <chan_id> --amount 200000

Reduce Rebalance Fees

• Set --max-fee-rate to limit fee spend (e.g. 200 ppm)
• Target channels with cheap peers in between
• Use bos --max-fee to cap absolute fee in sats
• Rebalance during low-fee periods (weekends/nights)

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