A Practical Guide to Acquiring Public Address Space
Your CFO may have already spotted the problem in AWS billing. Since February 2024, Amazon has charged $0.005 per public address per hour, and that gets expensive fast across a fleet of instances.
At the same time, mail delivery can slip, your hosting provider may refuse more delegated space, and the ARIN waiting list remains hard to plan around. The last distribution happened on January 13, 2026, with no reliable schedule after that.
Clean address space is still available on the secondary market. The mistake is treating it like a simple purchase instead of a regulated transfer with real routing, compliance, and reputation risk.
The safest approach is simple. Size the block you actually need, price it at the block level, verify chain of custody and reputation before funds move, and plan the first 30 days so the space routes cleanly and sends mail without surprises.
Key Points To Know
Move fast only after you know your block size, your budget, and your risk controls.
Pricing moves with the market. In early 2026, small blocks traded around the low $20s per IP on average, while large blocks, such as /16 and larger, dropped below $20 per IP.
A /24 is the practical floor. ARIN and APNIC enforce a /24 minimum transfer size, and anything smaller is widely filtered on the global Internet.
Transfers beat waiting lists when timing matters. A brokered transfer with complete paperwork usually closes in two to three weeks, not quarters.
Cloud pricing changed the math. A small owned block can cost less over two to three years than recurring public IP charges in the cloud.
Reputation and routing hygiene matter as much as price. Check Spamhaus before the deal, then fix ROAs, IRR objects, reverse DNS, and geofeed data right after the registry update.
Escrow is mandatory. Use a transfer-aware escrow process, verify the seller in RDAP or WHOIS, and screen counterparties against OFAC if your compliance team requires it.
What You Are Actually Acquiring
You are not buying property, you are acquiring registered control of a block under registry policy.
In practice, the transaction is a transfer recorded by a Regional Internet Registry, or RIR. ARIN covers North America, RIPE NCC covers Europe and the Middle East, APNIC covers Asia-Pacific, LACNIC covers Latin America, and AFRINIC covers Africa.
A few other terms show up in every deal. RDAP and WHOIS are registry records that show the current holder. IRR, short for Internet Routing Registry, stores routing policy objects. RPKI, or Resource Public Key Infrastructure, lets you publish a ROA, which is a signed statement showing which ASN may originate your prefix.
The paperwork matters, but the registry update is the step that counts. Your routing stability and mail results depend on what happens after that update, not on the signed purchase agreement alone.
How Pricing Works
Budget by block, not by a single headline number, because size, provenance, and reputation history all change the price.
Independent market tracking showed softer prices through 2025. By January 2026, large-block deals cleared as low as $9 per IP, while recent averages sat near $22. Marketplace data also showed 16 and larger transactions falling below $20 per IP for the first time since 2019.
Smaller blocks usually cost more per address because they are easier to place. A clean /24 from ARIN or RIPE often lands in the mid $20s to low $30s per IP. Lease rates tend to sit around $0.35 to $0.45 per IP per month across major regions.
Run the cloud math before you dismiss a purchase. At Amazon's $0.005 hourly rate, one public address costs about $3.65 a month, or $43.80 a year. Fifty addresses cost about $2,190 a year, so a small block can pay for itself faster than finance expects.
Compare three years of ownership against three years of lease or cloud charges. If your team needs stable, portable space and can handle the upfront spend, ownership usually wins. If cash is tight or the project is short, leasing can still make sense.
Three Ways To Acquire Space
The right path depends on how fast you need the block, how much compliance help you want, and whether you prefer capital or operating expense.
Use A Broker
This is usually the fastest route. A good broker helps with pre-approval, escrow, document flow, and region-specific transfer rules. Ask for proof of holdership in RDAP, a full-block reputation check, and a clear chain of custody before you commit.
If you need a clean /24 quickly, a broker that can pre-qualify you with ARIN and coordinate escrow is often worth the fee. When both sides are organized, two to four weeks is realistic.
Use A Marketplace
A marketplace works when you can be flexible on block shape or region of origin. Watch reserve prices, platform fees, and seller authority carefully. You still need escrow and registry verification, even if the listing looks polished.
This route can widen your options, but it also increases your screening work. Check whether the seller can actually transfer the block under the relevant RIR rules before you spend time negotiating price.
Use A Lease
Leasing turns upfront cost into monthly spend, which helps with pilots, seasonal traffic, or mail warmup. Make sure the lease includes routing permission and a clear letter of authorization.
Leasing is useful as a bridge, not a cure-all. It may solve an immediate shortage, but it does not replace the documentation you may need for a later transfer under ARIN policy.
When the goal is a compliant purchase rather than a temporary lease, it helps to start with a broker that can verify holdership, line up ARIN pre-qualification, coordinate escrow, and surface chain-of-custody details before money moves, because that reduces timing risk, avoids documentation surprises during registry review, and gives your team a cleaner path to closing, which makes Buy IPv4 a practical first stop for evaluating clean /24 options.
How Transfers Work By Region
The process is similar everywhere, but the proof you need and the timing you face will change by registry.
The normal sequence is straightforward. Pre-qualify where required, sign a purchase agreement, fund escrow, open transfer tickets, complete the registry update, then harden routing and reverse DNS.
ARIN
For recipients, ARIN usually requires an RSA and proof that 50 percent of the requested space will be used within 24 months, or proof that 80 percent of current holdings are already utilized. Transfer caps apply up to a /16 per six months.
Once escrow is funded, the parties open an 8.3 transfer for intra-ARIN deals or an 8.4 transfer for inter-RIR cases. A clean file with complete documentation often reaches a registry update in about three weeks.
RIPE NCC
The recipient must be an LIR member or work through a sponsoring LIR. The seller starts the process in the LIR Portal and provides signed transfer documents plus company registration records.
Release escrow only after the registry confirms the change. RIPE's waiting list is still limited, with one /24 per LIR and only for members that have not previously received an allocation.
APNIC
Both parties must be APNIC account holders. The minimum transfer size is a /24, and recipient pre-approvals are time-limited, commonly to 24 months.
APNIC reviews the transfer ticket before the registry update is finalized. That means delays usually come from incomplete documents, stale company records, or unclear need justification.
Inter-RIR Transfers
ARIN supports inter-RIR transfers with APNIC, RIPE NCC, and LACNIC, but not AFRINIC. The seller starts in the source registry while the buyer meets the rules of the destination registry.
These deals usually take longer because they involve more documents and two policy frameworks. If your deadline is fixed, build extra time into legal review and registry response time.
Risk Checks Before You Pay
Most expensive mistakes show up before closing, if you look for them early enough.
Run these checks before funds leave escrow:
Reputation: Test sample IPs and the full block against Spamhaus and other major blocklists. If anything is listed, require written remediation steps before closing.
Fraud: Verify the seller in RDAP or WHOIS and match signers to corporate authority documents. A polished invoice means nothing if the signer cannot legally transfer the resource.
Routing Safety: Reject blocks with stale IRR route objects tied to unknown ASNs. After transfer, publish ROAs and clean up old routing policy so the block cannot be hijacked or mis-originated.
Compliance: Screen counterparties against sanctions lists if your jurisdiction requires it. U.S. buyers commonly add OFAC screening to the close checklist.
Technical Fit: Treat a /24 as the minimum for global reachability. Anything more specific is commonly filtered, which makes the block far less useful in production.
What To Do In The First 30 Days
The registry change is only the start, because the real work is making the block usable on live networks.
Day 0
Publish ROAs for every prefix you plan to originate. Create or correct IRR route objects and any needed as-set records. Set reverse DNS that matches your mailing domains, remove stale objects left by the seller, announce from the correct ASN, and confirm visibility in BGP looking glasses.
Day 1 Through Day 30
Publish a geofeed and submit geolocation corrections to providers such as MaxMind. Warm up mail-sending IPs slowly while watching blocklists and complaint signals. If you use cloud platforms, evaluate BYOIP to reduce recurring public IP charges. Update IPAM and document internal allocations for future audits.
Keep one more strategic point in view. On March 28, 2026, IPv6 traffic to Google services passed 50 percent globally for the first time. Dual-stack where you can, because that is the cleanest way to slow future demand for scarce legacy space.
A Sensible Long Term Plan
Own only the space you can justify today, then slow future demand with better network design and broader IPv6 use.
That balance keeps cost under control and lowers operational risk. A clean, right-sized block plus disciplined routing and mail hygiene will serve you better than a larger block with weak controls.
FAQs
These four questions cover the issues teams usually need cleared before they approve a budget.
What Is The Smallest Block That Still Routes Worldwide?
A /24. Smaller prefixes are widely filtered on the public Internet, so they are a poor fit for global reachability. ARIN and APNIC also treat /24 as the minimum transfer size.
How Long Does An ARIN Transfer Usually Take?
With pre-approval and complete paperwork, plan on about three weeks from a completed sale to the registry update. Inter-RIR deals and files with missing documents can take longer.
How Can I Check That A Block Is Not Listed?
Run the entire block through Spamhaus and other major reputation services before closing. Also ask for confirmation that stale IRR objects, old reverse DNS, and any known abuse history have been addressed.
Should I Wait On A Registry Waiting List Instead?
Only if your timeline is flexible and a small allocation is enough. Waiting lists are unpredictable, and the block size may not match your deployment plan. Transfers give you more certainty, while leasing can cover a short gap.
