The IPv4 Transfer Market in 2026: Prices, Volume, Trends
Free pools are gone, prices have recovered from the 2024 dip, and millions of addresses change hands every year. Here is where the market stands.
Supply is structurally gone
The RIR free pools ran dry between 2011 and 2020. Every IPv4 address now lives in a registry, owned by someone — the only source of new supply is the transfer market, where blocks move between organisations under RIR policy.
Prices and volume
Prices peaked around $60 per address in 2021, cooled through 2024, and have been firming again: /24s trade in the high-$20s per IP, larger blocks in the mid-teens. Roughly 30–40 million addresses changed hands per year in the last two years, across tens of thousands of registered transfers.
What is moving the market
Cloud providers charging $40+ per address per year pushed enterprises to consolidate; leasing (renting space instead of buying it) grew ~20% year over year; and ARIN-led inventory is tightening. The structural driver never went away: IPv6 adoption is still slow, and every new network needs legacy addresses.
For anyone trading or operating networks, the actionable signal is not the headline price — it is knowing which blocks are dormant, clean and transferable before they hit the market. That is exactly the kind of lead IPDORM produces.