The free pool is gone, the waiting list takes over a year and the secondary market sets the price. Here's what that means for hosting and ISP businesses. IPv4 exhaustion is no longer a future risk that hosting providers and ISPs will have to address, it is the industry reality today, as all regional internet registries have exhausted their free pools and there is no longer a supply available. The only ways to get addresses are the official waiting lists, which are slow and unpredictable or the secondary market, where prices and availability fluctuate weekly.
For any business that depends on public IPv4 addresses to be able to onboard customers or scale infrastructure, understanding what happens at zero and what it costs to avoid getting there has become a core planning requirement, not a technical footnote.
The Data behind the Shortage
The numbers make the scale of the problem clear:
• ARIN's waiting list is now over a year deep: As of April 2026, the oldest unfulfilled request was being waited around 388 days, and 523 requests had remained unmet even after recent distributions. ARIN's own guidance put realistic waiting periods at 12-20 months and its free pool had been empty since 2015.
• The secondary market is busier than ever: Roughly 24 million IPv4 addresses had changed hands globally in only first five months of 2026, already more than half of all of 2025's full year total and at the fastest transfer pace ever recorded.
• Prices remain volatile and demand driven: Current market data put outright purchase prices in a range of $18 to $50 per address, depending on block size and registry region, with smaller blocks commanding a premium. Leasing runs roughly $0.30 to $0.60 per address per month.
• IPv6 adoption remains insufficient to bridge the gap: With global IPv6 adoption sitting at approximately 40%, a majority of internet facing infrastructure still requires IPv4 to be reachable.
Together, these numbers point to one conclusion: waiting until you're out of addresses is the most expensive and least reliable way to solve this problem.
What Actually Breaks When You Run Out
New customer onboarding is stalled: Sales can secure the deal but provisioning cannot assign an IP that does not exist. Every deployment waiting in the queue is a direct loss of revenue.
Existing customers are also impacted: Workarounds like reclaiming addresses from inactive accounts, shifting customers to shared or NAT-based IPv4 addresses and rationing new allocations address the immediate shortfall but impact use-cases that genuinely require dedicated IPs like mail-servers and certain compliance-bound workloads.
Reactive buying has higher cost and risk: Businesses that have to buy under time-pressure lose out on their negotiating leverage and are more likely to buy address blocks with unresolved reputation issues (previously flagged by spam filters or blacklisted) that takes months to remediate before they can be put to use.
Retention is at risk: With low switching costs in hosting and ISP markets, inability to provide requested IP-resources for a new deployment, a scaling-event or a compliance requirement provides customers with an opening to look elsewhere.
How to Stay Ahead of It
Providers who avoid this problem treat IPv4 inventory as an ongoing planning function rather than a reactive purchase:
• Audit current IP holdings on a fixed schedule, versus only acting when a shortage becomes apparent
• Forecast demand not against current demand, but against actual growth plans
• Buy blocks of IPv4 space before utilization gets tight, while there is still room to negotiate price, and to qualify the block
• Pursue a dual stack IPv6 rollout to minimize long term IPv4 dependence, while realizing that it won't satisfy immediate need
• Work with an established IPv4 partner, who can provide verifiable clean history, and who can quickly respond to critical timing needs
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