Your transaction failed with 'out of gas', and you are staring at a wallet that clearly has ETH in it. So how can you be out of gas? This is the single most misunderstood error in crypto, and the confusion comes down to one word doing two jobs.
The short answer
Out of gas does not mean you ran out of ETH. It means the transaction hit the gas LIMIT you set for it (the maximum amount of computation you authorised) before the smart contract finished. The fix is almost always to raise the gas limit and resubmit, not to add more ETH.
Gas limit vs gas price vs ETH balance
Three different things get tangled together whenever people talk about gas. Keeping them separate is the whole trick to understanding this error.
- Gas limit: the maximum units of computation you allow the transaction to use. This is the one that causes an 'out of gas' failure when it is too low.
- Gas price (or gas fee): how much you pay per unit of gas. This affects how fast your transaction is mined and how much it costs, not whether it runs out.
- ETH balance: the coins in your wallet. You need enough to pay the fee, but having plenty of ETH does not prevent an out-of-gas failure if the limit itself is too low.
Think of gas limit as the size of the fuel tank you agreed to fill, and gas price as the price per litre. Running out of gas means the tank you authorised was too small for the journey, not that your bank account was empty.
Why it happens
Wallets estimate the gas limit automatically before you sign. Most of the time that estimate is correct. It goes wrong in a few predictable situations:
- The contract call is more complex than the wallet predicted, for example a swap that routes through several pools, or a claim that loops over many positions.
- The state of the contract changed between the estimate and the moment your transaction was mined, so the real execution needed more gas than estimated.
- You manually lowered the gas limit to save money, and set it below what the transaction actually needs.
- The contract itself reverts late in execution in a way that consumes almost all the gas provided.
How to fix it
- Resubmit the transaction and let the wallet re-estimate. A fresh estimate often succeeds if the earlier one was made against stale state.
- If it fails again, open the advanced or edit gas settings in your wallet and raise the gas limit by 20 to 50 percent above the estimate. Unused gas is refunded, so a higher limit does not cost more when the transaction succeeds.
- Do not raise the gas price to fix this; that only changes speed and cost, not whether the transaction runs out.
- If raising the limit still fails, the transaction is probably reverting for a different reason and only looks like out of gas because the revert burned the gas. At that point you need the real revert reason.
How to confirm it really was out of gas
On a block explorer, open the failed transaction and compare gas used to gas limit. If the transaction used close to 100 percent of the limit, it genuinely ran out of gas. If it used only a fraction of the limit and still failed, it did not run out; it reverted for another reason, such as a failed require() check, a custom contract error, or slippage. Those are covered in our companion guide on why transactions fail.
Get the answer instantly
Open the free TxID Support transaction checker at txid.support/check, pick the protocol you were using, and paste your wallet address. It finds the transaction, replays it, and tells you whether it was truly out of gas or reverting for another reason, in plain English, with no wallet connection required.
Once you separate the gas limit from your ETH balance, out of gas stops being mysterious. In the large majority of cases the fix is a single click: raise the limit and resubmit. If that does not work, the transaction is telling you something else went wrong, and the next step is to read the real revert reason rather than keep adding gas.