Is the RIPE 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 maximum allocation is a single /24, or 256 addresses, once per LIR. There is no second helping and no way to request more.

What it costs to stand in the queue

The RIPE NCC's published 2026 charging scheme sets a one-off sign-up fee of €1,000 and an annual fee of €1,800 per LIR account. Those are not waiting-list fees, they are the cost of membership, and membership is the entry ticket. You pay them from the day 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 has run well beyond a year. If your wait turns out to be two years, the arithmetic looks like this:

• €1,000 sign-up, paid once
• €1,800 per year for two years, so €3,600
• Total before a single address is usable: €4,600

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 €1,800 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, the calculation changes completely. Organisations 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 €1,800 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. If you need a /22, the waiting list does not solve your problem, it solves an eighth of it.

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 €1,800 obligation to acquire an asset you could obtain in days through other routes, and keeping that obligation afterwards.

It is worth being precise about that last point, because it is widely misunderstood: you do not need your own LIR in order to hold IPv4 space. You need one to be a member of the RIPE NCC. Holding provider independent or legacy resources requires a sponsoring LIR, which is a different and much cheaper arrangement.

The routes that do not involve queueing

Buying on the transfer market. Address space changes hands between organisations 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 RIPE transfers within 24 hours of payment and RIPE usually completes them in 1-3 business days, though registry processing is outside our control. ARIN and APNIC transfers take 2-4 weeks.

Leasing. No transfer, no registry queue, no membership. Leased space is usually live within 24 hours of payment, and you can resize or return it as your requirement changes.

Sponsorship. If you buy provider independent or legacy space 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 €1,800 a year that membership would cost you.

Where RTM Networks fits

We are not going to tell you the waiting list is never worth joining. If you are already a member, 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 we will tell you honestly what it would cost to buy or lease it and how quickly it could be live, so you can compare that against €1,800 a year and an unknown wait. We usually reply in 1-3 business hours, and if the answer is that queueing genuinely suits you better, we will say so.