How small can a payment be while still adding value to your wallet? If you receive 1 satoshi (0.00000001 bitcoin) in a transaction then adding it as an input to a larger transaction would add more than 1 satoshi to the transaction fee. This means the 1 satoshi shows in the total balance for your wallet, but in reality it is not worth anything to you because it would cost more than 1 satoshi to spend. In fact if you need to empty the wallet completely then the 1 satoshi is causing a loss.
So how small can a payment be while still adding value to your wallet?
You generally would not be able to receive a single satoshi.
The Bitcoin Protocol defines something known as a &quot;dust limit&quot;.
The exact value of this limit varies based on the receiving address type, but it is defined as the minimum amount of BTC required to spend an input for a given address type.
It is calculated by using a basic 1 input 1 output transaction consuming an input from that address type at the minimum acceptable fee level, and calculating its fee (minimum fee level * tx size).
This works out to 546 satoshis for traditional p2pkh addresses, and 294 for p2wpkh addresses.
Transactions that create one or more outputs under the dust limit will be rejected by the network and you will not be able to broadcast them (even if other outputs in the transaction are above the dust limit). If you're left with a value under the dust limit as change, most wallets will add it to the fee.