Leasing or Buying IPv4: How the Numbers Actually Compare

Three routes, three different commitments

There are only three ways to get IPv4 address space in 2026, and they commit you to very different things.

Apply to the registry. In the RIPE region this means joining the waiting list, which requires becoming a member and caps out at a single /24. Elsewhere the free pools are effectively gone or rationed. It is the cheapest route on paper and the slowest in practice.

Buy on the transfer market. A block is transferred into your name under the registry's transfer policy and stays yours. Capital up front, permanent afterwards.

Lease. You get the right to announce space held by someone else, usually with the routing paperwork included. An operating cost, reversible, and quick.

Most comparisons stop at capital expenditure versus operating expenditure, which is a real distinction but not the one that decides it. The figure that decides it is usually the annual cost of registry membership.

The fixed cost that decides most of this

The RIPE NCC's published 2026 charging scheme sets a €1,000 one-off sign-up fee and €1,800 per year for each LIR account. What matters about that €1,800 is not its size but its shape: it is fixed. It does not scale with how much address space you hold. You pay the same whether your LIR holds a single /24 or a /16.

That has a straightforward consequence. The smaller your requirement, the more the membership fee dominates the total, and the worse the registry route looks. For an organisation holding a /16 the fee is a rounding error against the value of the space. For an organisation that needs one /24 it is very likely the largest line in the budget, larger than what the same block would cost to lease for a year.

This is why the lease-versus-buy question so often has a different answer than people expect at the small end. Anyone comparing "lease a /24" against "become an LIR and get a /24" is not comparing an operating cost against a capital cost. They are comparing an operating cost against a larger recurring operating cost, plus a sign-up fee, plus a wait of unknown length.

You do not need your own LIR to own address space

Here is the part that changes the arithmetic, and it gets missed constantly.

Buying address space does not require you to become a RIPE NCC member. Provider independent and legacy resources have to be attached to a Local Internet Registry that maintains the registry relationship, but that LIR does not have to be yours. A sponsoring LIR holds the membership relationship while the resources stay registered to your organisation, and you keep full control: announce the space from wherever you like, through whichever upstream you choose, and manage reverse DNS as you see fit.

Our sponsorship is €199 per year per resource, plus a one-off €149 setup fee. Set that against €1,800 a year for a membership you would otherwise be maintaining purely to hold your own space, and the €1,800 stops being an unavoidable cost of ownership. It becomes a cost you only take on if membership itself is worth something to you.

So the honest framing of the decision is not "lease, or pay €1,800 a year to own". It is "lease, or buy and pay a couple of hundred a year to keep the registration in order".

What buying is good at

Buying makes sense when your requirement is stable and you can fund it.

• The cost stops. After the purchase and the transfer, ongoing cost is the sponsorship fee, which is small and predictable.
• It is an asset. Address space has held its value well and can be sold again. Lease payments do not come back.
• Nobody can take it back. The registration is yours. There is no renewal conversation and no counterparty risk.
• It suits scale. The larger the block, the better buying looks, because the fixed costs spread further.

The obvious drawback is that a purchase is permanent, which is an advantage when your requirement is stable and a liability when it is not. At current market prices even a single /24 is a meaningful one-time outlay, and that capital is committed.

What leasing is good at

Leasing makes sense when the requirement is uncertain, temporary, or moving.

• No capital and no membership. Nothing to fund up front, nothing to join.
• It is fast. No registry transfer is involved, so leased space is usually live within 24 hours of payment. A purchase depends on the registry: we file RIPE transfers within 24 hours of payment and RIPE usually completes them in 1-3 business days, while ARIN and APNIC transfers take 2-4 weeks.
• It flexes. Monthly and annual terms, resizable, returnable. If a project ends or a customer leaves, the cost ends with it.
• It is reversible. You are not committing to a view about where IPv4 prices go next.

The drawback is that the payments continue and you build no asset. Over a long enough horizon on a stable requirement, leasing costs more in total than buying.

A decision you can actually make

Strip it back to three questions.

How certain is the requirement? If you are confident you will still need this space in five years, buying is likely cheaper overall. If there is a real chance you will not, leasing prices that uncertainty for you.

How quickly do you need it? Days means leasing. Weeks can accommodate a purchase.

Would you be an LIR anyway? If yes, the registry route and the waiting list are worth considering, because you are paying the fee regardless. If no, do not take on a €1,800 annual obligation to solve a problem that sponsorship solves for a fraction of it.

What should not drive the decision is the assumption that owning address space requires membership. It does not, and once that is off the table the comparison gets much simpler.

Where RTM Networks fits

We do both, which means we have no particular stake in which one you pick. We hold and broker PA and legacy blocks across the RIPE, ARIN and APNIC regions, we lease from a single /24 upward, and we act as sponsoring LIR for organisations that want to own their space without running a registry.

Tell us the block size, the region and roughly how long you expect to need it, and we will quote both routes so you can compare them against each other and against the cost of membership. We usually reply in 1-3 business hours. If your case is one where buying is clearly better, we will tell you that, and the same the other way around.