IPv4 Market in 2025: Price Correction, Rising Demand, and What Comes Next in 2026

If somebody had told us in early 2024 that large blocks would be trading under $20 an address within two years, we would have asked to see their math. Yet that is exactly where the market went. 2025 handed the IPv4 market its sharpest price correction in more than a decade, and it did so while transaction volumes were breaking records and the pool of buyers was growing wider than we have ever seen it. Falling prices and a busier market at the same time is a combination that confused a great many people last year, but once you look at the mechanics behind it, it is not actually so strange.

If you are weighing a purchase, a sale or a lease heading into 2026, then it pays to understand what actually happened last year, because the headlines, for the most part, did not tell the story very well.

The Big Story: Prices Came Down, Significantly

Let us start with the number that everyone quotes. After a long climb that peaked above $50 per address, purchase prices fell across every block size in 2025. The large blocks were hit the hardest. A /16 or bigger dropped below $20 per address, which is territory that the market had not visited since 2019.

The explanation, in our view, lies with the hyperscalers. Amazon and the other large cloud buyers dragged prices upward through 2020 to 2022 while they were stockpiling inventory. At a certain point they had what they needed, and they stepped back from the market. The buyers who remained, and there were more of them than ever before, simply could not absorb the available supply at peak-era prices. Large holders saw that the top of the market was behind them, and decided that the time to divest was now rather than later. That meant more supply, more cautious bidding, and prices that ground their way down across the board. Anyone who was paying attention to the composition of the buyer pool could have seen it coming.

Transaction Volume Tells a Different Story

Here is the part that the gloomy headlines missed: the market was anything but quiet. Roughly 33 million IPv4 addresses moved through the RIR transfer registries in 2025, and the count of individual transactions kept climbing as well. The registries now hold records of more than 56,000 transfers since 2012.

So demand did not collapse. What changed was who could afford to participate. Smaller ISPs, growing hosting providers, and startups building out their cloud infrastructure had been priced out of this market for years, and in 2025 they finally found blocks at numbers that their budgets could stomach. Lower prices made the market bigger rather than weaker, and that distinction matters a great deal for anyone trying to work out where things go next.

Regional Market Dynamics

Geography mattered too. ARIN-registered space kept its price premium, supported by North American cloud and enterprise demand, while RIPE NCC handled the highest transfer volumes of all the registries. The European market is simply a busier one.

For context, the global pie at the start of 2026 amounts to roughly 3.7 billion allocated IPv4 addresses, spread across the five RIRs. Nearly half of it, 45%, sits with ARIN. APNIC holds 24%, RIPE NCC follows closely at 23%, and LACNIC and AFRINIC round things out with 5% and 3% respectively. These proportions are worth caring about, because they shape the deal flow. Inter-RIR transfers keep cross-regional deals possible, but every registry runs its own policies on its own clock, and that is something you feel on every single transaction.

Leasing Market Stayed Resilient

While purchase prices were sliding, the leasing market barely flinched. Average rates eased a little, to around $0.40 per IP per month, and utilization stayed above 80%. That resilience makes sense to us. A lease sidesteps the large upfront capital outlay of a purchase, and it lets you scale your space up or down as the business moves. Plenty of CFOs prefer that arithmetic no matter where purchase prices happen to sit.

One regional outlier is worth flagging: APNIC leasing ran hot, at more than $0.60 per IP, because that is the region where IPv4 scarcity bites the hardest and where the markets are growing the fastest. Globally, we expect rates to hold in the band between $0.38 and $0.45 through most of 2026.

Why Demand Isn’t Going Away

Every year, without fail, somebody asks us whether IPv6 is about to make all of this irrelevant. Someday, perhaps. Not soon. We have been hearing that prediction since we started brokering, and IPv4 demand has outlived every version of it so far. IPv6 keeps advancing among the large carriers and the content networks, that much is true, but it has not come anywhere near the critical mass that would cut real IPv4 dependency. In the meantime, there is a whole list of things pushing v4 demand in the other direction:

• AI and machine learning infrastructure: the compute buildout is enormous, and much of it still leans on IPv4 for its external-facing services, its data collection and its API endpoints.
• IoT proliferation: billions of devices keep coming online. Many of them speak IPv6, certainly, but the gateways and the management layers behind them usually do not.
• Cloud expansion: every new region, availability zone and edge site needs addresses, and there is no way around that.
• Regulatory and compliance requirements: audit trails, geo-compliance and security controls. Whole industries mandate specific IP addressing for these purposes, and those rules do not care what the market is doing.

What to Expect in 2026

Our read on 2026 is stabilization, and most of the people who watch this market closely seem to land in roughly the same place. The dramatic corrections of 2025 should moderate as prices find their floor, and a few things point in that direction:

• Growing buyer participation: more organizations keep stepping in at these lower price points, and that buying naturally props up the floor.
• Steady leasing demand: leases keep a baseline of recurring demand running underneath the whole ecosystem.
• Limited new supply: nobody is minting new IPv4 addresses, and nobody ever will be. Whatever reaches the market comes from an existing holder deciding to let it go.

What does all of that mean in practice? Sellers can still do well, especially those sitting on unused or underutilized blocks. The peak prices may be gone, but the liquidity is not, and a well-positioned block with a clean history still commands competitive money. Buyers may have it even better at the moment. Prices sit at multi-year lows, the transfer processes have become quicker over the years, and there is more supply available than at any point in the last five years. Windows like this one do not stay open forever.

How Prefixx Can Help

Reading the market is one thing, and closing a deal in it is quite another. That part turns on registry policy, transfer timelines, block reputation and the quirks of each individual RIR, and it is where experience earns its keep. The team behind Prefixx has been at this since 2007, and as a registered broker with ARIN, RIPE NCC and APNIC that is nearly two decades of watching cycles like this one come and go.

If you are looking to buy, sell or lease IPv4 addresses, our team handles the entire process in a white-glove manner, with zero buyer fees and with a process that respects both your time and your budget.

Contact Prefixx and we will gladly talk through your IPv4 strategy for 2026 with you.