Why it takes three steps
Most chains give you one unstake button and a long wait behind it. Nimiq splits the same idea into three transactions you send yourself, and the split is visible because your stake sits in three separate buckets inside the staking contract.
- Active. Delegated and counting toward your validator. This is the only bucket that earns.
- Inactive. Deactivated and serving out the lock period. Earns nothing.
- Retired. Released and ready to leave the contract.
Each step moves value from one bucket to the next, and nothing skips a bucket.
| Step | Transaction | Moves | What gates it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Deactivate | Set active stake | Active to inactive | Nothing. Send it whenever you like. |
| 2. Retire | Retire stake | Inactive to retired | The lock period has to have passed. |
| 3. Withdraw | Remove stake | Retired to your address | The whole retired balance, or nothing. |
The state lives on the chain, not in the app you started in. You can close the wallet after step one and come back a week later on a different device; the contract still knows which step is next.
Step 1: deactivate
Deactivating tells the protocol how much of your stake should stop working. The balance moves from active to inactive, it stops counting toward your validator, and the lock starts running.
You do not have to deactivate everything. Leaving part of the stake active is normal and the rest carries on earning while the deactivated part cools down. You can also run more than one of these at once: deactivate some NIM today and some tomorrow, and you will have a cooling balance and a withdrawable balance at the same time, each on its own clock.
One trap, and it matters if you ever build the transaction yourself rather than using a wallet. The set active stake transaction does not take the amount you want to unstake. It takes the balance to leave active. Pass the amount a person typed and you unstake everything except it, which is the exact opposite of what they asked for. Putting it back is another transaction, and like every stake change it only takes effect at the next election block, so the mistake costs a slice of a day of rewards. Every interface worth using does that conversion for you, ours included.
Step 2: retire
Retiring moves the released inactive balance into the retired bucket, which is the one the withdrawal can draw from. It is the step with the clock on it.
The rule from the developer documentation: the inactive balance can only be released after the lock period has passed, and for a staker whose validator is not jailed that is one epoch of reporting window, counted from the next election block. Our own unstaking flow runs on the same arithmetic. One epoch is 43,200 blocks, and Nimiq produces roughly one block a second, so an epoch is about 12 hours.
Notice where the count starts. A deactivation takes effect at the next election block, not the instant it mines, so the wait you actually experience is whatever is left of the current epoch plus one full epoch after it. That normally lands somewhere between about 12 and 24 hours. There is no way to shorten it and no fee that speeds it up.
Send the retire before the lock has passed and the chain simply refuses it. The transaction never mines, your staker record is unchanged, and nothing is lost except the attempt. The dialog on this site reads the height your deactivation took effect from the node, adds the epoch, and keeps the button off with the remaining time on its face until the chain head gets there.
The case that takes days
If your validator is jailed for serious misbehaviour, its stakers wait the longer of the reporting window and the remaining jail period. A jail lasts eight epochs, which at about 12 hours an epoch is where the official FAQ's range of "12 hours to 4 days" comes from. The long end of that range is not the normal case; it is the jailed case.
How much to retire
You can retire everything, or retire part and leave the rest. If you leave some, the non-retired balance has to stay at or above the minimum stake, which is 100 NIM as of 14 September 2026. Retiring all of it is always allowed.
Step 3: withdraw
The remove stake transaction takes the retired balance out of the staking contract and puts it back in an ordinary account. It is available as soon as the retire has mined, which in practice is about a minute. There is no second wait.
The one hard rule here: it has to take the entire retired balance. The documentation is explicit that partial removal is not allowed. If you want to unstake in pieces, you shape that at the earlier steps by deactivating and retiring only part of your stake, not at this one. If the withdrawal empties your staker record completely, the protocol deletes it, and staking again later simply creates a new one.
Worth knowing for anyone reading the raw transaction: unlike the first two steps, this one names a recipient address. That is where the NIM lands. In every normal flow it is your own account, which is exactly why sending the wrong address here would go unnoticed until the money was somewhere else.
How long the whole thing takes
Putting the three steps together, with every figure checked on 14 September 2026 against the developer documentation and the constants our own unstaking flow uses:
- Deactivate: effective at the next election block.
- Wait: one epoch, 43,200 blocks, about 12 hours, counted from that election block. Roughly 12 to 24 hours from when you send the deactivation.
- Retire, then withdraw: two transactions, about a minute apart.
- If your validator is jailed: the longer of the reporting window and the jail period, and a jail is eight epochs.
The staking transactions themselves carry no network fee, so the cost of unstaking is the rewards the balance does not earn while it is out of the active bucket, and nothing else.
What Nimiq does not have is the fixed multi week unbonding period that generic proof of stake explainers keep attaching to it. If an answer tells you NIM takes 7 to 21 days to unstake, it is describing a different chain and has not checked this one.
Stakers and validator operators are on different paths
Two of the three words are the same, which is why search results mix them up constantly. A staker deactivates, retires and withdraws: three transactions signed by the staker, a lock measured in hours, and the delegated NIM returns to their own account. A validator operator deactivates, retires and deletes: the deactivation takes effect at the next election block, the retire is only accepted once the reporting window has closed, and the delete permanently removes the validator and returns its 100,000 NIM deposit, which can take up to about two days in total and only happens once the delegations are withdrawn. If stake remains, the protocol leaves a tombstone record so those stakers can still get their NIM out. If you are a staker, nothing in that second sequence applies to you, including the deposit and the two day figure.
Where to do it
- The Nimiq Wallet, at wallet.nimiq.com. The browser interface walks the same three protocol steps.
- Nimiq Pay, on a phone. The app can send all three transactions natively, signing on the device.
- The Stake NIM button on this site. Its unstake view shows one card per step with the balance available at each, a live countdown on the retire card, and no fee on any of them. It only handles stake delegated to our own validator.
They all produce the same transactions against the same contract, so a stake started in one can be unstaked from another.
What actually goes wrong
- Stopping after step one. Deactivating is not withdrawing. A balance left inactive earns nothing and sits there indefinitely until someone sends the other two transactions.
- Retrying the retire in a panic. An early retire is refused by consensus. Sending it five more times does not help; waiting does.
- Typing a partial amount at the withdrawal. The retired balance leaves whole or not at all.
- Expecting rewards during the wait. The inactive and retired buckets earn nothing, by design.
- Withdrawing in order to switch validator. Half unnecessary, and worth getting exactly right. Nimiq has an update staker transaction that moves a delegation without your NIM leaving the staking contract, so steps two and three above are not part of a switch. Step one and the lock are: the protocol only accepts the update once the active balance is zero and the inactive balance has been released. The rule is set out in staking mistakes we see as operators.
Check it on the chain
Every one of these steps is a public transaction. Look your own address up in our block explorer after each step and you will see it, and NimMap draws the same movements as edges around the address. If you are choosing where to put the NIM next, our validators page compares the whole set from live chain data, and the rest of the Learn hub covers the chain underneath.
Nothing on this page is financial advice.