What You Need to Know About Buying IPv4 Addresses in 2026

Every device that connects to the internet needs an address. Not a name — those are handled by domain servers — but a number. A specific, routable, globally unique string of digits that tells every router between here and there exactly where to send the data. In the version of the internet most of the world still runs on, those numbers look something like 192.168.1.1. There are about 4.3 billion of them. There will never be any more.

That's the premise of the IPv4 address market: a finite resource, growing demand, and no obvious off-ramp. For most of the internet's history, this fact barely registered. Addresses were handed out freely by regional registries to ISPs and corporations that asked. Then, around 2011, the last large pools of unallocated space ran dry. The giveaways stopped. And a secondary market — slow at first, then surprisingly large — emerged to fill the gap.

In 2026, that market is at a peculiar moment. After years of steep price growth that peaked around $50 to $60 per address during the infrastructure frenzy of 2021 and 2022, valuations have fallen sharply. Large blocks now change hands for as little as $13 or $14 per IP. Smaller blocks sit in the $20 to $30 range. The correction has been significant — down roughly 14% in 2023, another 17% in 2024 — and most people who follow this space closely think prices are approaching a floor.

What makes this worth paying attention to isn't just the price move. It's what's driving it, and what comes next. The pool of transferable addresses has shrunk from roughly 44.8 million in 2015 to around 18.6 million by mid-2024. Availability of large contiguous blocks — the kind that major cloud providers and carriers need — dropped 42% in 2024 alone. Addresses, once deployed into live infrastructure, almost never come back into circulation. Industry estimates put the annual attrition rate at around 5%. The math of a finite, shrinking supply meeting sustained demand doesn't resolve itself quietly.

Why IPv6 Hasn't Fixed This

The standard response to any of this is: what about IPv6? It's a fair question. IPv6 is the successor to IPv4, standardized in 1998 and designed specifically to solve the address exhaustion problem. Its address space is so vast — 340 undecillion addresses, roughly — that scarcity is essentially not a concept. So why are people still paying real money for IPv4 space?

The answer is mostly inertia, which sounds dismissive but isn't. The internet's operational infrastructure was built for IPv4. Routing hardware, software stacks, databases, legacy systems, security tools — most of it assumes IPv4 as the baseline. Migrating isn't technically impossible; it's just expensive, time-consuming, and risky to do on live systems that people depend on. Global IPv6 adoption currently sits below 50%, and that's after two decades of being told the transition was imminent.

"IPv6 is like electric cars — it's been around for 20 years, it's supposedly better, but we're creatures of habit. Nobody wants to buy something new when they don't have to. If servers are already running, why spend tens of billions retrofitting entire networks?"

— Jake Brander, CEO, Brander Group

Brander has been brokering IPv4 transactions since 2016 and has watched the transition argument play out in slow motion. His view is blunt: the internet runs on IPv4, the people who run the internet know it, and the secondary market exists because that reality isn't changing quickly enough to matter for anyone making infrastructure decisions today.

There's also a compounding factor that doesn't get discussed much. New broadband infrastructure — particularly in underserved rural areas — requires IPv4 space to operate. The US federal BEAD program, a $42 billion initiative to extend broadband coverage, is expected to generate a 10 to 20% increase in IPv4 demand as providers build out the networks that will actually deliver those connections. That demand has to come from the secondary market. There is no other source.

What It Costs and How It Works

The market trades in standardized blocks. The smallest unit that can be independently routed on the public internet is a /24 — that's 256 addresses, and it's the minimum most regional registries will process in a transfer. From there the sizes double: a /23 is 512, a /22 is 1,024, a /21 is 2,048, and so on. Per-address pricing falls as block size grows, reflecting both economies of scale and the relative scarcity of large contiguous allocations.

At current market rates, a /24 costs roughly $25 per IP — around $6,400 total. A /22 runs about $18 per IP, or just over $18,000. A /20 — 4,096 addresses — sits around $14 per IP, or approximately $57,000. These prices were two to three times higher three years ago. Whether they stay here, fall further, or begin recovering is genuinely uncertain, but the structural argument for buying during a trough rather than a peak is straightforward enough.

For organizations not in a position to commit that capital upfront, leasing is a real alternative. Lease rates currently average between $0.38 and $0.45 per IP per month — about $120 a month for a /24, scaling to around $1,650 for a /20. Leasing makes sense for variable needs or short time horizons. Over several years, though, the cumulative cost of leasing generally exceeds what a purchase would have cost at today's prices.

"Without what we do, the Internet will stop working at some point because there are no IP addresses. IP addresses are the only thing driving the growth of the entire Internet right now."

— Jake Brander, CEO, Brander Group

Choosing Who to Buy Through

The brokerage side of this market is smaller and more specialized than most people expect. A handful of firms handle the majority of transfers, and the differences between them matter more than they might in a more commoditized industry. Transfer volume, registry relationships, blacklist screening capability, and post-sale support vary considerably — and a broker who cuts corners on due diligence can leave a buyer holding a block that looks fine on paper but is operationally compromised from day one. If you're researching options, a side-by-side comparison of the leading IPv4 brokers is a reasonable starting point for understanding how the major players actually differ on the things that matter.

One distinction worth understanding upfront is how pricing models work. Some platforms run auctions, which introduce uncertainty into what should be a straightforward transaction — you may not know your final cost until the bidding closes, and competitive dynamics can push prices above where they'd land in a negotiated sale. Fixed-price models remove that variable. You know what you're paying before you commit, which makes budgeting and approval processes considerably cleaner.

The Part People Underestimate: Due Diligence

IPv4 addresses have histories. They've been used, sometimes for years, by whoever held them before. That history matters. A block that spent time supporting a spam campaign, a phishing operation, or a botnet will carry blacklist entries that make it operationally useless — upstream providers simply won't route it, or receiving mail servers will reject everything that comes from it. Buying a block without thoroughly checking its background is the most common way an IPv4 purchase goes wrong.

Experienced brokers scan blocks against major global blacklists before any transaction closes and can typically remediate problems before the transfer goes through. The transfer process itself runs through the relevant regional registry — ARIN in North America, RIPE in Europe and the Middle East, APNIC across Asia-Pacific, LACNIC in Latin America — each with its own compliance requirements and timelines. ARIN, for instance, requires buyers to demonstrate a justified need under specific transfer policy sections. APNIC requires both parties to hold active account status. None of this is especially difficult with proper guidance, but attempting it without experience is how transactions stall or fall apart.

Standard practice for legitimate transactions includes escrow — funds held by a neutral third party until the registry confirms the transfer — along with a formal purchase agreement that specifies the block, price, timeline, and what happens if something goes wrong. The actual transfer, once submitted, typically takes two to three weeks to process.

After the Transfer

Getting the registry record updated is the finish line people fixate on, but it's not quite the end. Newly transferred addresses need several things done before they're fully operational. RPKI — Resource Public Key Infrastructure — involves setting up Route Origin Authorizations that protect your announced routes from being hijacked by bad actors. IRR (Internet Routing Registry) records need to be updated so that upstream providers will actually accept your BGP announcements. Major geolocation databases, which everything from advertising platforms to fraud detection systems consults, need to reflect the correct location of your new space. None of this is complicated, but all of it matters, and skipping it leads to problems that are annoying to diagnose after the fact.

"Your computer cannot connect to the Internet without an IPv4 address. Internet providers cannot deliver service without IPv4 addresses. AI does not work without IPv4 addresses."

— Jake Brander, CEO, Brander Group

The IPv4 market is unusual in a lot of ways. It's one of the only places where you can buy pieces of internet infrastructure on a secondary market, where the underlying resource is genuinely finite and the demand curve is determined by how fast the rest of the world builds new things that need to connect to everything else. The price correction of the past two years has created a window that didn't exist recently and may not exist much longer. Whether that window is relevant to any particular organization depends entirely on what they're building — but for those who know they'll need the space, the arithmetic of acting now versus waiting is fairly hard to argue with. For anyone starting that research, understanding how different brokers handle the full transfer process — not just the listing, but the compliance, the post-sale configuration, and what happens when something goes sideways — is probably the most useful first step.