Is the RIPE NCC waiting list worth it? Running the numbers

What the waiting list actually is

The RIPE NCC ran out of freely allocatable IPv4 in November 2019. Since then it has not stopped allocating entirely, but what it hands out comes from recovered space: blocks returned voluntarily, deregistered after a member closed, or reclaimed through the registry's own processes. That trickle is distributed in order of request, and the queue for it is what people mean by the waiting list.

Two constraints define it. You have to be a RIPE NCC member, which means opening a Local Internet Registry account. And the allocation is exactly one /24, 256 addresses, for an LIR account that has never had IPv4 from the RIPE NCC: everything the RIPE NCC allocates to a single LIR is capped at that total (ripe-826, section 5.1). There is no second helping and no way to request more.

The queue is long. On 16 October 2026, 799 LIRs were on the waiting list, and the one at the front had been waiting 480 days (how the list has moved). A /24 that does arrive cannot be sold on straight away either: IPv4 cannot be transferred for 24 months from the day it was received (ripe-807, section 2.2.1).

What it costs to stand in the queue

The RIPE NCC's charging schemes set a one-off sign-up fee of €1,000 and an annual fee per LIR account of €1,800 in 2026 and €1,894 in 2027. Those are not waiting-list fees, they are the cost of membership, and membership is the entry ticket. You pay them from the quarter you join, not from the day your allocation arrives.

That is the part most people leave out of the comparison. The queue is fed by recovered space, which arrives unpredictably, so the wait is not something the RIPE NCC can commit to in advance. It already runs well beyond a year. If yours turns out to be two years, two full years of membership at the 2026 and 2027 fees cost this:

• €1,000 sign-up, paid once
• €1,800 for 2026 and €1,894 for 2027, so €3,694
• Total before a single address is usable: €4,694

Spread across the 256 addresses you eventually receive, that is roughly €18 per address in membership fees alone, before you count the administrative time of running an LIR or the cost of whatever you did to cover the gap in the meantime. And the annual fee does not stop when the allocation arrives. It continues for as long as you hold the membership.

When the waiting list makes sense

There is a version of this that adds up, and it turns on one question: would you be an LIR anyway?

If the answer is yes, and your account qualifies, the calculation changes completely. Organizations that run their own registry operations, hold provider aggregatable space, manage their own AS numbers under their own membership, or act as a sponsor for others are paying the annual fee regardless. For them the waiting list is not a cost, it is a queue they are already standing in for free, and the /24 at the end is a bonus rather than a purchase. Joining it is close to a no-brainer.

The other case is a genuinely long horizon. If the addresses are for something that starts in two or three years and nothing depends on them before then, the queue costs you patience rather than opportunity.

When it does not

For everyone else it usually does not work, for three reasons.

Your timeline is shorter than the queue. Most requirements have a date attached. A deployment, a migration, a customer contract. The waiting list cannot be accelerated and cannot be forecast, so it is not something you can plan a launch around.

You need more than a /24. 256 addresses is the ceiling per LIR account. If you need a /22, the waiting list does not solve your problem, it solves a quarter of it, and the workaround of opening more accounts is now closed (below).

You do not otherwise need membership. This is the common one. Becoming an LIR purely to stand in a queue means taking on a recurring annual fee to acquire an asset you could obtain in days through other routes, and keeping that obligation afterward.

It is worth being precise about that last point, because it is widely misunderstood: you do not need your own LIR to hold provider independent or legacy space. For PI a sponsoring LIR is enough, and much cheaper; legacy space needs no contract at all, though RPKI for it does. You do need membership to hold PA space, which is why the kind of block matters as much as its size (leasing or buying sets the three side by side).

More than one /24: no more extra accounts

Until recently a member that wanted more than one /24 from the queue could, in principle, open additional LIR accounts, each with its own place in the queue and its own annual fee. That route is closed for now. From 29 September 2026 the RIPE NCC's Executive Board temporarily restricted members from acquiring additional LIR accounts, including one that would come with a merger or acquisition between two members, and the restriction covers requests that were already in progress. It stays until the outcome of the related policy discussions is clear. Accounts that members already hold are not affected.

The practical consequence is simple. An organization that needs more than one /24 can no longer get there through the waiting list, so the rest has to come from the transfer market or a lease. For anything beyond a single /24 the alternatives below are no longer the second-best option. They are the only ones.

The routes that do not involve queueing

Buying on the transfer market. Address space changes hands between organizations under each registry's transfer policy. Supply is not rationed the way registry allocations are, so size is a question of price rather than availability. We file transfers with the RIPE NCC within 24 hours of payment. "In most cases, a transfer is completed within one or two business days", the RIPE NCC says, once the documents are complete. The other registries take more steps (the three registries compared). Our stock and prices are on buy IPv4.

Leasing. No transfer, no registry queue, no membership. Leased space is usually live within 24 hours of payment, and it leaves room to grow: a larger or smaller block is a new quote, and a monthly lease ends on 30 days' notice (lease IPv4).

Sponsorship. If you buy provider independent space, or legacy space you want RPKI for, and do not want to run an LIR, a sponsoring LIR holds the registry relationship on your behalf while the resources stay registered to you. Ours is €199 per year per resource plus a one-off €149 setup fee, against the €1,894 a year that membership costs from 2027 (PI and ASN sponsorship).

Where RTM Networks fits

We are not going to tell you the waiting list is never worth joining. If you are already a member and eligible, or already planning to become one, add your name and take the /24 when it comes.

What we would push back on is joining purely to queue. Tell us the block size you need and the region, and ask us to price both routes: we will tell you honestly what buying and leasing would cost and how quickly the space could be live, so you can compare that against a membership's annual fee and an unknown wait. If the answer is that queueing genuinely suits you better, we will say so.