The IPv4 Market Found Its Floor, And Prices Are Ticking Up Again
The IPv4 Market Found Its Floor, And Prices Are Ticking Up Again
The IPv4 transfer market has done something it hasn't done in three years. Market trackers now show prices stabilising and beginning to recover after the correction that ran from 2022 through 2024.
There is no single global spot price for an IPv4 address. What you pay depends on the registry region, the block size, the prefix's history and reputation, and whether you're going through a broker or arranging a private transfer. With that said, one market tracker estimated first-quarter transfer prices at roughly $30 per address for a /24, $26.50 for a /20 and $20 for a /16, with the average near $25 and prices up between 1% and 5% on 2025. 1 Larger blocks generally trade lower per address, because buyers pay for aggregation.
That is still below the 2021 peak, when brokered transfers widely exceeded $50 per address and some ARIN and RIPE deals went higher, before a correction through 2022 and 2023 pulled prices back substantially. 2 What has changed is the direction of travel.
The floor is structural
The supply side cannot meaningfully expand. The pool of previously unallocated IPv4 space is effectively exhausted: APNIC and AFRINIC retain limited remaining space under post-exhaustion policies, while the other registries rely almost entirely on transfers and recovered blocks. By CircleID's accounting, the total allocated to registries has stopped growing altogether, slipping 0.01% last year to 3.687 billion, though allocated is not the same thing as announced or routed. Additional addresses now come from reuse and redistribution rather than from a registry. 3
The earlier price decline was mostly demand-side: the speculative buying of the cloud boom unwound, while some large holders also monetised legacy blocks. That has largely worked through. What remains is structural scarcity against structural demand. IPv6 does relieve some of the pressure, particularly on mobile and large eyeball networks, but as we covered in March, crossing half of Google's users doesn't remove the requirement for IPv4 reachability while significant parts of the internet remain v4 only. 3
Bundled, unbundled, or rationed
An IPv4 address is a capital asset on a hosting provider's balance sheet, or a recurring lease cost. Either way it's real money, and it lands in one of three places.
It can be bundled and invisible, with the address included and its cost spread across the plan. That's simple, and it's what most customers prefer.
It can be unbundled and charged, so you see "+€1.50/mo per IPv4" on the invoice. Honest, but it makes the sticker price look artificially low.
Or it can be rationed, with the provider giving you IPv6 freely and making additional IPv4 addresses difficult to get. That's increasingly common, and it's the direction of travel.
The pattern worth being suspicious of is a very cheap plan with multiple dedicated IPv4 addresses included. At around $25 an address, the maths on that has to come from somewhere, and often it comes from reputation. Some low-cost address pools carry baggage: prior abuse history, existing blocklist entries, or stale geolocation data that puts your server in the wrong country. You save €2 a month and spend a week trying to get your mail delivered.
Dual-stack as standard
We include what you need and we're straightforward about the rest.
Every AVS ISP VPS, VDS and dedicated server comes dual-stack, with a dedicated IPv4 address and native IPv6 from boot and no ticket required. Plans start at €5/mo for a VPS, €40/mo for a 4 vCPU VDS rising to €160/mo at 16, and €150/mo for bare metal.
For customers who need to be their own source of truth on addressing, we support bringing your own space. We operate AS210464, run RPKI validation on the routes we accept, and provide a full BGP community set covering per-region and per-peer-type announcement control, prepending, and remote-triggered blackholing. BGP sessions start at €5/mo. Every VM comes with a routed /48 of IPv6, and for space of your own to announce you either bring it or lease it from us.
That last option is the one worth understanding if you're buying addresses. Holding your own /24 doesn't hand you a clean reputation, because reputation follows the prefix and a purchased block arrives with whatever history it already has. What it gives you is control of the addressing relationship rather than dependence on a provider's allocation, and you can move the prefix between our sites in Tirana, Skopje, Amsterdam and Dublin without renumbering a thing. For anyone whose business depends on mail deliverability or a stable identity in routing, that portability is worth a lot more than the monthly cost of the session. Check the block's history before you buy it, not after.
Four habits worth having
Check the reputation of any address you're given. Before you deploy, look it up on the major blocklists. Five minutes now, a fortnight saved later.
Don't hoard. Unused addresses cost your provider money and, increasingly, cost you.
Use IPv6 for east-west traffic, because your machines talking to each other don't need scarce v4 addresses.
And if you need more than a handful, price your own /24 against per-IP fees. A /24 at $30 an address is somewhere near $7,700 up front, against roughly €384 a month if you were renting all 256 at €1.50 each. The exact crossover depends on exchange rates, financing costs and how long you expect to hold the space, but ownership can become competitive faster than many organisations expect.
The address shortage isn't going to resolve. Price accordingly.