LND Circular Rebalancing - Fix Route Failures and Fee Issues

What Is LND Circular Rebalancing?

Circular rebalancing sends a payment from your node, through other nodes, back to yourself — moving liquidity from an outbound-heavy channel to an inbound-heavy one without closing either.

Common Errors

• no route found for circular rebalance
• insufficient local balance in source channel
• rebalance failed: fee too high
• TEMPORARY_CHANNEL_FAILURE along rebalance path

Manual Circular Rebalance via lncli

# Find a route from channel A back to channel B
lncli queryroutes --dest $(lncli getinfo | jq -r .identity_pubkey) \
  --amt 100000 --outgoing_chan_id <chan_A_id>

# Send circular payment
lncli sendtoroute --payment_hash <hash> --routes <route_json>

Using balance-of-satoshis (bos)

# Install bos
npm install -g balanceofsatoshis

# Rebalance: move 500k sats, max 0.1% fee
bos rebalance \
  --out <outbound_peer_pubkey> \
  --in <inbound_peer_pubkey> \
  --amount 500000 \
  --max-fee-rate 100

# Check channel balances
bos balance

Fee Optimization Tips

• Set --max-fee-rate to 0.1% or less (100 ppm) to avoid overpaying
• Rebalance during low-fee periods (weekends, off-peak hours)
• Use smaller amounts (100k-500k sat) for higher route success rate
• Avoid rebalancing channels with less than 20% capacity

Channel liquidity problems? DM on Nostr for a free channel health review.