How to Buy IPv4 Addresses in 2026 Without Overpaying
A /24 trades around $27 per IP, a /19 around $14. Understanding why — and how due diligence works — is the difference between a good block and an expensive mistake.
There is no queue any more
The regional registries stopped handing out IPv4 space between 2011 and 2020, when the last free pools emptied. All ~4.3 billion addresses are allocated. If you need address space today, you buy it from an organisation that already holds it, through a registry-approved transfer. That is the whole market.
What the market costs today
Price scales inversely with block size, because larger blocks are harder to assemble and buyers pay a premium for small, precise quantities: | Block | Addresses | 2026 price per IP | Approximate block cost | |---|---|---|---| | /24 | 256 | ~$27 | ~$6,900 | | /20 | 4,096 | ~$16 | ~$65,500 | | /19 | 8,192 | ~$14 | ~$114,700 | For context: the market peaked around **$60 per IP in 2021**, corrected through 2022–24, and has been recovering since. Anyone quoting you 2021 prices in 2026 is either uninformed or hoping you are. The other anchor is the cloud alternative: roughly **$44 per address per year**. At /24 pricing, a purchased address pays for itself against a cloud IPv4 charge in well under a year — which is precisely why enterprise consolidation has been a steady source of demand.
Buy, or lease?
Leasing runs about **$0.40 per IP per month**. Compare over your actual horizon: - **Under 24 months, or uncertain need** → lease. No capital, no registry process, exit when you want. - **Over 24 months, address space core to the business** → buy. Lower total cost, and you hold a transferable asset in a market where supply is structurally finished.
The five checks before you wire money
**1. Registry status.** Confirm the seller is the registered holder and that the block is transfer-eligible under the relevant RIR policy. Policies differ across ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC, and inter-RIR transfers carry extra conditions. Verify in the registry, not in the seller's PDF. **2. Reputation.** Check major blocklists for current and historical entries. Check whether the prefix has a hijack history — announcement by unrelated ASNs is the tell. If email matters to you, treat this as a pass/fail gate, not a discount negotiation. **3. Routability.** A block nobody will route is a block you cannot use. Confirm the prefix is not sitting on bogon filters and that /24 is the smallest thing you buy if you plan to announce it yourself. **4. Chain of custody.** Legacy blocks — allocated before the modern RIR framework — can carry ambiguous documentation. Ask who has held it, when, and under what agreement. Ambiguity here is the single most common cause of a transfer stalling at the registry. **5. Escrow.** Never pay before the transfer is approved. Use escrow, tie release to registry confirmation, and put both conditions in the contract.
Where the good blocks come from
Public listings are a competitive market: everyone sees the same inventory, and price reflects that. The blocks worth having are frequently the ones that have not been listed — registered space that has been dormant for years, held by an organisation that has simply never considered it an asset. Finding them requires seeing which blocks are quiet. That is measurement, not registry lookup: a registration record says who owns a block, never whether anything is running on it. The **RIPE region — Europe and Türkiye — carries the highest transfer volume in the world**, which makes it both the deepest pool of supply and the most instructive place to watch how quiet space moves into the market.
The practical takeaway
Set your budget from the per-IP table, choose block size before you choose a seller, and treat reputation and registry status as gates rather than negotiating points. Then do the part most buyers skip: look for the space nobody has listed yet. --- *Find dormant, unlisted IPv4 space on the IPDORM dark space map — [ipdorm.com](https://ipdorm.com).*