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Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade, targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026, could raise the gas cost of creating a new account from 25,000 to 183,600, a roughly sevenfold increase, under two proposals designed to make network fees reflect real state growth.
The proposals, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, address what developers describe as the growing burden of Ethereum’s state, the information that must be maintained by network nodes. The last major repricing of state-related operations came with the Berlin upgrade in 2021.
At the centre of the proposal is a concern over the amount of data Ethereum must permanently store as the network expands.
According to EIP-8037, the state portion of the Geth database stood at about 390 GiB in January 2026. Meanwhile, raising the block gas limit from 30 million to 60 million increased the amount of new state generated each day from roughly 105 MiB to 326 MiB.
That growth rate has prompted developers to reconsider the Ethereum gas fee attached to operations that create permanent state.
EIP-8037 proposes a common cost of 1,530 gas per new state byte, with state creation measured through a separate gas dimension. The objective is to keep annual state growth around 120 GiB under a baseline block gas limit of 150 million gas.
The Ethereum Foundation says the repricing is intended to make network costs correspond more closely with actual resource consumption.
“Gas prices more accurately track the real work each operation takes.” — Ethereum Foundation, Protocol Research, EthPandaOps and Specifications teams
The broader Glamsterdam roadmap similarly says the changes are necessary because some forms of state creation have remained relatively cheap compared with the permanent storage burden they impose on Ethereum nodes.
The proposed changes are substantial for several operations.
Creating a new account would rise from 25,000 gas to 183,600 gas, an increase of roughly 7.3 times. Creating a new storage slot would rise from 20,000 to 97,920 gas, while deploying 24 KiB of contract code alongside an account would increase from 4,947,200 gas to 37,784,880 gas.
The proposed Ethereum gas fee model is designed to separate execution costs from the cost of creating persistent state. That means developers could still have room for computational processing without allowing the network’s ordinary execution limit to become the only constraint on permanent state growth.
EIP-8038 tackles the other side of the problem: accessing information already stored on Ethereum. It raises the cost of several state-access operations, including certain account accesses, storage writes and contract creation operations.
The changes are not intended simply to make Ethereum more expensive. Developers argue that accurately pricing resource-intensive operations is important if the network is to safely increase its capacity.
Ethereum’s official roadmap says some state-access operations are currently underpriced relative to the work they require from nodes, particularly as the network’s state has grown.
The most immediate concern is not necessarily higher costs for every Ethereum user, but compatibility.
An impact assessment covering 4 million blocks and more than 929 million transactions between December 2024 and June 2026 found that most transactions would remain unaffected. However, some transactions could require higher gas limits, while a smaller group were classified as potentially broken.
Under EIP-8037, about 2.69 million transactions fell into the potentially broken category. Under EIP-8038, the figure was about 3.04 million. Together, these represent only a small fraction of the transactions examined, rather than millions of separate smart contracts.
The distinction matters because the same application can generate many transactions.
The contracts most at risk are those that make assumptions about fixed gas costs. These include applications relying on the 2,300-gas stipend, hardcoded gas values for internal calls, gasleft()-based logic or pre-signed transactions with fixed gas limits.
The Ethereum Foundation has also identified potential compatibility issues across smart-account infrastructure and protocols including ERC-4337 EntryPoint, ZeroDev, Alchemy, Across, Socket/Bungee, CoW Protocol and 0x.
“The large maljority of smart contracts are unaffected.” — Ethereum Foundation, in its August 24, 2026 Glamsterdam repricing assessment
For contracts that cannot simply be repaired by increasing their gas limit, developers may need to deploy new infrastructure and migrate users.
That makes the Ethereum gas fee changes particularly important for wallets, decentralized applications, RPC providers and developers whose systems depend on fixed gas assumptions.
The proposals are currently moving through the review and testing process, with Glamsterdam targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026. Public testing is already underway through the Platåberget environment.
The Ethereum Foundation launched Platåberget in August as a testing ground for Glamsterdam’s changes, including its gas repricing system. Developers are being encouraged to use the environment to identify compatibility problems before the changes reach mainnet.
The foundation has warned that the repricing reaches beyond individual smart contracts because wallets, indexers and gas-estimation systems will also need to account for the new model.
“Please use this opportunity to understand what tooling or assumptions break in your system before the fork goes live in Mainnet.” — Ethereum Foundation, announcing the Platåberget testnet
The Ethereum gas fee model under Glamsterdam is not yet final in every detail, and public testnet and mainnet activation dates remain subject to the upgrade process. Developers nevertheless have a window to test their applications before the changes become part of Ethereum’s production network.
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