How to Check a Monero Balance (and Why an Address Alone Is Not Enough)

You cannot look up a Monero balance from an address alone. That is not a missing feature; it is the privacy Monero is built for. To check a balance you need one of three things: the wallet itself, its private view key, or a proof for one specific payment. This guide shows each one, what it reveals, and how to avoid the "balance checker" sites that exist only to steal recovery words.

The short answer

Why an address shows nothing

On Bitcoin, your address appears on the public ledger every time you are paid, with the amount next to it. Anyone can paste it into an explorer and read your balance. Monero was designed so that this does not work. Two features do the job:

• Stealth addresses. Every payment goes to a fresh one-time address that only the receiver can link to their wallet. Your published address never appears on the chain. See the Moneropedia entry, or our plain-words guide to the Monero stealth address.
• RingCT. Amounts are hidden. According to Moneropedia, RingCT is how transaction amounts are hidden, and it has been mandatory for all transactions since September 2017.

So a "Monero address lookup" on a block explorer finds nothing to show. Your address lets people pay you, not watch you. That is exactly what you want from private money.

Three ways that work

1. Open the wallet itself

The simplest way to check your own balance is to open the wallet that holds your recovery words and let it sync. The wallet scans the network with your keys, finds every payment to you and every spend from you, and adds them up. If you only have the words, restore them; our guide on how to restore a Monero wallet covers it.

In MonkStash the balance screen also tells you how much is spendable now, with a countdown for funds that are still locked after a recent payment. If part of your balance is waiting, read why part of your Monero is locked.

2. Watch it with the view key

Good for checking a cold wallet, a donation address or a shop till without exposing the spend key. Details in the next section.

3. Prove one payment

If you only need to confirm that a specific transfer happened, a transaction key proves it without revealing anything else. See check one payment instead.

Watch a wallet with its view key

Every Monero wallet has a private view key. Moneropedia explains that by sharing it, a person allows access to view every incoming transaction for that address. Put the address and the view key into a view-only wallet (also called watch-only) and you get a window onto the wallet that can watch, but never spend.

In MonkStash it takes about a minute:

1. Open the MonkStash wallet and choose Add a watch-only wallet.
2. Paste the primary address (it starts with 4) and the private view key (64 characters).
3. MonkStash checks that the view key really belongs to that address, so a mismatched pair is caught before you wait for a sync.
4. Add a rough date of the first payment to speed up the scan, set a password, and let it sync.

Everything happens in your browser: there is no account, and the keys are not sent to us. Monero GUI and Feather can make view-only wallets too, as the official view-only wallet guide shows. For the full walkthrough, see our Monero view-only wallet guide, and for what the key itself is, the Monero view key explained.

What a view key cannot show (yet)

Here is the honest catch. The Monero project's view-only guide says a view-only wallet can only see incoming transactions; it cannot see outgoing ones. Moneropedia adds that the balance shown via a view key should not be relied upon.

In practice: if the wallet has ever sent money, the view-only balance stays too high, because it still counts the spent funds. MonkStash says so on the balance screen of every watch-only wallet. To get the true figure, check in the full wallet. (Some wallets can import "key images" from the full wallet to correct it; our view-only guide explains how.)

This is planned to improve. The Carrot addressing scheme, part of the planned FCMP++ upgrade, includes a full view-only tier that its specification says can identify spent outputs and so show the correct balance without being able to spend. Until that upgrade is live and your wallet supports it, treat a view-only balance as "received so far", not "what is left".

Check one payment instead

Often you do not need a balance at all. You need to know whether one payment arrived. Monero has a tool for that: the transaction key. The sender takes three things from their wallet (the transaction ID, the recipient's address and the transaction key) and anyone can check how much that one transaction sent to that address. The official payment proof guide shows the commands, and our Monero transaction lookup guide covers explorers and proofs step by step.

It reveals nothing else about either wallet, which makes it the right tool for settling "did you send it?" with an exchange, a seller or a friend.

Fake balance checkers

Search for "XMR wallet balance checker" and you may find sites that promise to show any Monero balance. Since that is impossible from an address, many of them ask for more: your recovery words, your private spend key, or a wallet file. That is the whole scam. Once you type the words, the site owner can empty the wallet, and Monero payments cannot be reversed.

If you already did, move your funds to a new wallet with new words now. Our guide on how to spot a fake Monero wallet site shows how.

Your next step

Want to see a wallet's incoming payments without risking the funds? Watch a wallet with its view key in MonkStash: free, no account, keys stay in your browser. Want the exact balance? Open the full wallet and let it sync. And if the balance looks wrong once it is open, our guide to a Monero wallet not showing a balance walks through the fixes.