IPv4 Price History 2014 to 2026: The Price per Address Every Year, Sourced

The IPv4 price history from 2014 to 2026 is a hill with a long slope up and a shorter slope down: an address traded for just under $10 in 2014, doubled to about $20 by the start of 2019, more than doubled again to $45 to $60 by the end of 2021, then slid to a 2023 average of $37.68, $33.09 in 2024, $27.75 in 2025 and about $20 in the first nine months of 2026 (Geoff Huston, APNIC, January 2026; IPv4Center, 2 October 2026). In plain money, a /24 of 256 addresses cost about $2,500 in 2016, $11,000 to $15,000 at the 2022 peak and about $6,400 in the third quarter of 2026. Every number here is a broker's, a registry's or a researcher's figure with its date; there is no official exchange for IP addresses and the sources do not always agree.

This page is the history. For today's prices see our IPv4 price index for 2026, and for monthly rents see IPv4 lease cost per IP for servers.

Key facts, checked on 28 October 2026:

• Before 2016 the unit price sat "just below $10 per address", doubled by early 2019, held at $20 to $25 for about 18 months, and reached $45 to $60 by the end of 2021 (Geoff Huston, "IP Addresses through 2022", January 2023, using Hilco Streambank transaction data).
• The highest single figure we found for a /24 is $15,540, or $60.70 per address, for ARIN space in October 2022 (IPXO, updated 19 October 2026, citing brokerage data).
• Yearly averages since then: $37.68 in 2023 across 543 deals, $33.09 in 2024 across 752 deals, $27.75 in 2025 across 901 deals (IPv4Center 2025 report, 8 June 2026).
• In 2026 the fall stopped: $20.04 per address in the first half, $20.28 in the third quarter, with /24 blocks at a median of $25 per address (IPv4Center, 2 July 2026 and 2 October 2026).
• Lease prices moved far less: $0.49 per IP per month in 2023, $0.50 in 2024 and $0.34 to $0.40 between June 2025 and May 2026 on the IPXO marketplace (IPXO, 24 March 2025; IPXO, updated 19 October 2026).
• AWS has charged $0.005 an hour for every public IPv4 address since 1 February 2024, saying the cost to acquire one "has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years" (AWS, 28 July 2023).

IPv4 price history by year, 2014 to 2026

One row per year. Where a source gives a range rather than an average, the cell says so. The /24 column is our multiplication of the per-address figure by 256; nobody quotes a /24 price for every year. Prices are in US dollars because every source reports in them.

Three warnings. IPv4Center's yearly averages are weighted across all block sizes, so they sit below what a /24 buyer pays: in 2026 the average is $20 but a /24 is $25. The pre-2021 figures rest on one broker's auction data (Hilco Streambank, now IPv4.Global) as read by an APNIC researcher, plus Brander Group's own table; private sales were never published. And IPv4Center's 2023 and 2024 reports were published in June 2026 as backfilled reports, not at the time.

How many addresses changed hands each year

Price without volume misleads. Geoff Huston's yearly address reports count the addresses that moved between holders under the registries' transfer policies, from the registries' published logs, summed across all five registries ("IP Addresses through 2025", January 2026, Table 5).

Read the two tables together and the 2021 spike explains itself: the fewest addresses since 2016 changed hands in the year the price rose fastest. In 2022 supply came back (44.3 million, the largest year in the series) and the price stopped rising. IPv4.Global's review of 2022 says addresses transferred rose 35% while transactions fell 28%, so the average deal grew to over 10,000 addresses (IPv4.Global, "2022: Complex & Unpredictable"). Big holders had started selling.

Why did IPv4 prices rise and then fall?

An IPv4 address is one of about 3.7 billion usable numbers that every device on the public internet needs. The regional registries that hand them out for free ran dry one by one, and after that the only way to get more was to buy or rent from someone who already had them.

2011 to 2015: the free pools close

APNIC, the registry for Asia and the Pacific, reached its final /8 on 15 April 2011 and limited every member to one /22 from it (APNIC), later cut to a /23 (APNIC). The first big public price came from a bankruptcy the same year: Microsoft paid $11.25 per address for 666,624 Nortel addresses (RIPE Labs). ARIN, for North America, depleted its free pool on 24 September 2015 and has run a waiting list since (ARIN). The market price stayed under $10 because RIPE NCC still gave a last /22 to any new member and most networks still had spare space.

2016 to 2019: a slow doubling

With ARIN closed, American networks that grew had to buy. Huston's reading of Hilco's data is that the unit price doubled between 2016 and the start of 2019, then "stabilised for the next 18 months at between $20 to $25 per address" (January 2023). On 25 November 2019 RIPE NCC made its final allocation and opened a waiting list for a single /24, open only to members that had never held IPv4 (RIPE NCC). Europe's new networks now had America's problem.

2020 to 2022: the climb to $50 and $60

LACNIC reserved its last block on 19 August 2020 (LACNIC, 28 August 2020). From mid-2020 the price left its band: IPv4.Global's marketplace peaked at $23 to $24 in summer 2020, hit $32 in February 2021 and $36 in May 2021 (The Record), and by July 2021 the broker wrote that prices were "averaging about $40 per address" with blocks hitting "nearly $60/IP" (IPv4.Global). Clouds and hosting companies were building out during the pandemic while fewer addresses than usual came to market. In October 2022 Brander listed /24 to /22 blocks at $40 to $50 and /16 to /12 blocks at $50 to $56 per address (Brander Group). That inversion matters: for the first time a large block cost more per address than a small one, because the buyers with the deepest pockets wanted whole /16s and few were for sale.

2023 to 2025: the fall

Two things changed. Sellers of large blocks arrived, and IPv4.Global reported /16 prices "dropping from nearly $50 in July 2024 to under $20 by June 2025" (CircleID, 23 July 2025). And the largest buyer of all started charging its own customers: AWS announced on 28 July 2023 that from 1 February 2024 every public IPv4 address would cost $0.005 an hour, in use or idle, about $3.65 a month, because the cost to acquire one "has risen more than 300% over the past 5 years" (AWS News Blog). A charge like that makes millions of customers release addresses they were not using, and it told the market the biggest buyer had bought enough. The Dutch registry SIDN summed up the result in May 2025: roughly $35 per address a year earlier, "towards the 30-dollar mark" now, /16s down from nearly $50 to little more than $20 (SIDN, 23 May 2025). Huston's January 2026 column records a /14 sold at $9 per address and a mean of $22 over the 40 days to 10 January 2026.

2026: a floor, and the IPv6 question

The 2026 reports describe a market that stopped falling: $20.04 in the first half, $20.28 in the third quarter (IPv4Center), and IPv4.Global's Jack Hazan wrote in June that January to April prices were "stable or rising" (CircleID, 10 June 2026). Why not fall to zero as IPv6 spreads? Because it spreads slowly. Google's share of users reaching it over IPv6 crossed 50% for the first time on 28 March 2026, at 50.10%, eighteen years after Google began measuring (Internet Society Pulse, 21 April 2026; live chart at Google IPv6 statistics). Half of users still cannot reach an IPv6-only server, so every public service still needs at least one IPv4 address, and at $20 to $25 that is a cost most networks simply pay.

IPv4 lease price history per address per month

Leasing means renting addresses by the month from a holder, who issues a letter of authorisation (LOA) and a ROA so your network may announce the block. The public record is short: IPXO's marketplace statistics start in 2022, and before that only scattered quotes exist.

The striking thing is how flat this is. While the sale price went from about $24 to $55 and back to $20, a /24 rented for roughly $90 to $150 a month the whole time. IPXO says lease prices follow sale prices "by a 6-8 month gap", and only partly, because a lessor's income depends on utilisation rather than the block's resale value. Renters never paid the 2021 panic premium, and they are not getting a 2026 discount either.

A /24 in 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2026: buy or lease?

Take one /24 and price it in four years using only the figures above: $10 per address for 2016 (Huston's base of the doubling), $22.50 for 2019 (middle of the $20 to $25 band), $45 for 2022 (middle of Brander's October 2022 range for /24s) and $25 for 2026 (IPv4Center's Q3 median). For leases there is no 2016 figure; for 2019 we borrow the closest published number, IPXO's September 2020 rate of $0.35 to $0.59 for a /24 (midpoint $0.47); for 2022 the 2023 average of $0.49, the nearest year with data; for 2026 Brander's $120 list price, $0.47 per IP. We ran the arithmetic with awk, which is on every Linux server:

# as a normal user, in an empty folder
cat > ipv4-years.txt << 'EOF'
2016 10 none
2019 22.50 0.47
2022 45 0.49
2026 25 0.47
EOF
awk '{ buy = $2*256; if ($3 == "none") { printf "%s  /24 to buy: %8.0f   lease: no public series\n", $1, buy } else { lease = $3*256; printf "%s  /24 to buy: %8.0f   lease: %6.2f a month   break-even: %3.0f months\n", $1, buy, lease, buy/lease } }' ipv4-years.txt

Output on 28 October 2026:

2016  /24 to buy:     2560   lease: no public series
2019  /24 to buy:     5760   lease: 120.32 a month   break-even:  48 months
2022  /24 to buy:    11520   lease: 125.44 a month   break-even:  92 months
2026  /24 to buy:     6400   lease: 120.32 a month   break-even:  53 months

Break-even is the number of months of rent that equal the purchase price, ignoring resale, fees and the time value of money. Three lessons fall out:

1. Buying in 2016 was the trade of the decade: $2,560 for a block worth four to six times as much by 2022. Nobody gets that again; the free pools are gone and the easy doubling with them.
2. Buying at the 2022 peak only beat leasing if you kept the block almost eight years. A 2022 buyer who sold in 2026 lost around $5,000 plus fees; a 2022 renter paid about $6,000 over the same four years and owns nothing. Roughly a wash, with very different risk.
3. In 2026 the break-even is about four and a half years. If you are sure you will run the network longer than that, buying at $25 per address is reasonable. If you might change hosts, countries or line of business before then, lease and keep the cash.

Put your own quote in ipv4-years.txt (year, price per address, lease per IP per month) and the command becomes your IPv4 price calculator. Add what the per-address figures leave out: broker and registry transfer fees when buying; "a deposit and some setup fees" on top of the monthly charge when leasing (IPv4.Global). On either path you still need an ASN and someone to route the block.

What the forecasts say, and who is saying it

We do not forecast IPv4 prices. The people who do all sell addresses, so read these as dated views of interested parties:

• Jack Hazan of IPv4.Global, 10 June 2026: year-end 2026 ranges of $15 to $22 per address for /16 and larger, $18 to $26 for /17 to /19, $22 to $30 for /20 to /21 and $28 to $40 for /22 to /24, "with $30-$36 the most probable range" for the smallest blocks; ARIN space to keep a 5% to 15% premium over RIPE space (CircleID).
• Jake Brander of Brander Group, 26 March 2026: "conservative estimates for 2026" of $25 to $30 per IP for /24 to /19 blocks and $15 to $20 for /18 to /16 blocks, after /16 prices "tanked in the last 2 years from $50 to $10" (CircleID).
• IPXO, 11 September 2025: the lease price "is expected to remain around $0.38 to $0.45 per IP throughout most of 2026", with APNIC space above $0.60 (CircleID).

Through September 2026 both small-block forecasts ran a little high (IPv4Center's Q3 /24 median was $25) and so did the lease forecast (IPXO's own page shows $0.35). Brokers have been wrong before: Brander's July 2022 note asked readers to consider prices that "stabilize at a $50 per IP average", and the average has not seen $50 since.

Frequently asked questions

How much did an IPv4 address cost in 2022?

About $50 on average in the first half of 2022 after starting the year at $55, according to Brander Group, which in October 2022 listed /24 to /22 blocks at $40 to $50 per address and /16 to /12 blocks at $50 to $56. The highest documented /24 sale we found is $15,540, or $60.70 per address, for ARIN space that October. Year-end trades ranged from $40 to $60 in Hilco Streambank data.

How much did an IPv4 address cost in 2023?

IPv4Center's 2023 report gives a weighted average of $37.68 across 543 priced deals. IPv4.Global reported /16 and larger blocks near $52 and /20 to /24 blocks about $36 in late 2023, and Geoff Huston records trades of $26 to $40 by December. A /24 cost roughly $9,200 to $9,650.

What was the highest IPv4 price ever?

Around $60 per address for individual blocks, in June and July 2021 (IPv4.Global reported blocks hitting "nearly $60/IP") and again in October 2022 ($60.70 for an ARIN /24, per IPXO). Yearly averages never got there: Brander Group's were $38 for 2021 and $50 for the first half of 2022.

Why did IPv4 prices fall after 2022?

Supply of large blocks rose while the biggest buyers slowed. Transfers hit 44.3 million addresses in 2022, the most in the series, and /16 blocks fell from about $50 in July 2024 to under $20 by June 2025 as holders sold. AWS began charging $0.005 an hour per public IPv4 address on 1 February 2024, which pushed customers to release unused addresses and signalled that the largest acquirer had bought enough.

Is there an IPv4 price chart I can trust?

No single one covers 2014 to 2026 from one dataset. IPv4.Global publishes monthly sales reports for its auctions, IPv4Center yearly and quarterly averages for the deals it tracks, IPXO lease statistics from 2022, and Geoff Huston's yearly APNIC columns plot Hilco Streambank's data. The table on this page lines them up by year with each source named.

Is it better to buy or lease IPv4 in 2026?

At a /24 median of $25 per address (about $6,400) against lease list prices of $120 to $150 a month, a purchase pays for itself after roughly four to five years of rent. Buy if you will hold the block longer and can carry the risk of a further fall; lease if you may move or grow, since the lease market has barely moved in six years while the sale price doubled and halved.

What twelve years of prices mean for a small network

If you run a few servers and need more than a handful of addresses, the history argues for three things. Get your own ASN, because without one neither a bought nor a leased block can be announced in your name; our guide to getting your own ASN and IP addresses covers the RIPE NCC route, and as a RIPE NCC member we sponsor ASNs for clients directly. Lease a /24 rather than buy unless you are certain of a five-year horizon, because the rent stayed near $90 to $150 a month through a sale market that went from $24 to $55 and back to $25. And route it on a flat-rate upstream so the block's monthly cost is the whole monthly cost: our IP transit from AS213900 in Amsterdam and Skopje is unmetered at 1, 5 or 10 Gbit/s, month to month, BGP session included, no 95th percentile billing (flat rate, prices on the IP transit page). We accept a leased block as soon as the IRR route object and ROA name your ASN; the paperwork is in announcing leased IPv4 with your ASN, LOA and ROA. For a second opinion on a quote, buy or lease, send it to us on Telegram and we will tell you how it compares with the numbers above.

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