IPv4 Lease Price in 2026: What You Actually Pay Per Address
Leasing runs around $0.40 per IP per month while cloud providers charge roughly $44 per IP per year. Here is how the gap forms — and how to read a quote.
The question every quote hides
Ask three providers what an IPv4 lease costs and you will get three numbers that are not comparable. One quotes per address per month, one quotes per block per year, one folds the address cost into a bandwidth bundle. Before you can judge whether a deal is good, you have to normalise everything to a single unit: **cost per IP per month**. At that unit, the 2026 market has a clear centre of gravity. Leasing runs at roughly **$0.40 per address per month**. Cloud providers, by contrast, charge around **$44 per address per year** for a public IPv4 — close to $3.70 per address per month, and that is the number that has pushed a whole generation of infrastructure teams to look outside their cloud bill.
Why leasing exists at all
All ~4.3 billion IPv4 addresses are allocated. The free pools at the regional registries ran dry between 2011 and 2020, so there is no queue to join and no form to fill in. Every address you obtain today comes from someone who already holds it — either permanently through a transfer, or temporarily through a lease. Buying is capital: at 2026 transfer prices, a /24 trades around **$27 per IP**, a /20 around **$16 per IP** and a /19 around **$14 per IP**. Those prices peaked near **$60 per IP** in 2021, corrected through 2022–24, and have been firming since. A /24 purchase is therefore a five-figure decision. A /24 lease at the market rate is a low three-figure monthly line item. For a team that needs address space for eighteen months, or that cannot justify a balance-sheet asset, the arithmetic writes itself.
How the price is actually built
The headline rate is a starting point. Real quotes move around it for four reasons: **Block size.** Larger contiguous blocks lease at a lower per-IP rate, mirroring the transfer market. The same discount curve that takes purchases from $27 down to $14 per IP flattens lease rates as you move from a /24 up to a /19 and beyond. **Reputation.** A block with a clean history — no spam listings, no residue on major blocklists, no hijack record — commands a premium, and it is worth paying. A cheap block that cannot deliver email is not cheap. Ask for the block's listing history before signing, not after. **Term.** Month-to-month flexibility costs more than a twelve- or twenty-four-month commitment. If your need is structural rather than seasonal, a longer term is usually the single biggest lever on your effective rate. **Routing support.** Some lessors hand you a block and an LOA and wish you luck; others handle the RIR object updates, the RPKI ROA and the upstream coordination. That work is real, and it is priced in.
Reading a quote like an analyst
Normalise to cost per IP per month. Then ask what happens at renewal — a rate that is attractive in year one and uncapped in year two is a rate you do not know yet. Confirm who holds the registry object and who can revoke the authorisation. Confirm the reputation guarantee is written down, with a remedy if the block turns out to be listed. And check the region: the **RIPE region — Europe and Türkiye — carries the highest transfer volume in the world**, which means deeper supply and more competitive pricing than thinner markets.
Lease or buy?
A rough rule: if your horizon is under two years, or your address need may shrink, lease. If your horizon is longer and address space is core to the business, the transfer market usually wins on total cost — and you end up holding an asset in a market where supply is structurally finished and demand from AI infrastructure, IoT and VPN services keeps arriving. Either way, the leverage is the same: knowing which blocks exist, which are dormant, and which are clean **before** they are on a broker's list. That is the part of the market that has never been visible from a price sheet. --- *Explore the dormant side of the address space on the IPDORM dark space map — [ipdorm.com](https://ipdorm.com).*