IPv4 Exhaustion Tracker — Global & Regional Allocation Stats

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority allocated the final /8 blocks to regional Internet registries in 2011, marking depletion of the free pool. RIRs still assign addresses to ISPs and enterprises from their remaining reserves, but no new large contiguous blocks exist at the top level.

Exhaustion does not mean the internet stops growing. Network address translation, carrier-grade NAT, IPv6 transition, and secondary market transfers stretch IPv4 further. The dashboard shows how close each registry is to emptying its own bucket.

Five RIRs divide responsibility geographically. APNIC serves Asia-Pacific. RIPE NCC covers Europe, Middle East, and parts of Central Asia. ARIN handles North America. LACNIC manages Latin America and Caribbean. AFRINIC covers Africa.

Each registry receives allocations from the global pool and sub-allocates to local ISPs, hosting providers, and enterprises. Allocation percentages in our tracker reflect published utilization estimates, not live transaction feeds.

The global bar aggregates address space handed to RIRs versus the historical total. Values above ninety-nine percent allocated indicate effective exhaustion of unassigned space — consistent with industry reporting that IPv4 is fully assigned at the IANA level.

The accompanying note clarifies that tiny remaining fragments may still move between registries under transfer policies, but greenfield deployments should plan for IPv6 or paid transfer markets rather than expecting fresh /8 allocations.

AFRINIC historically retained a higher remaining percentage than ARIN or APNIC because African internet growth started later relative to address consumption. Latin America sits between extremes. Asia-Pacific often shows the tightest supply due to population and mobile growth.

Bars are illustrative snapshots with a last-updated timestamp. For contractual address procurement, consult the live RIR statistics pages and your provider's allocation policy — our tool educates rather than certifies availability.

IPv6 expands address space by orders of magnitude, removing NAT complexity for end-to-end connectivity. Dual-stack deployment lets networks serve IPv4 through legacy pools while growing IPv6 native traffic.

Exhaustion awareness helps justify IPv6 project budgets to management. Show the global bar in architecture reviews when engineers propose NAT-heavy designs that will become harder to maintain as transfer prices rise.

Organizations with surplus IPv4 can transfer blocks under RIR policy to buyers who need routable space. Market prices fluctuate with supply. Exhaustion visuals explain why transfers exist — registries ran out of free blocks to assign.

Our tracker does not list transfer prices or broker services. It contextualizes why your ISP charges for additional IPs or steers you toward shared hosting addresses.

Shared hosting packs many sites on one IPv4. Cloud providers charge for elastic IPs. SaaS vendors NAT outbound traffic. All are responses to finite address supply.

When troubleshooting why a provider cannot attach another public IPv4 to your VM, reference exhaustion: their pool is constrained, not necessarily a billing upsell alone.

Figures compile from public RIR utilization reports and industry summaries, normalized into percentages for visual comparison. The last-updated field marks when our static dataset was refreshed.

Internet governance moves slowly relative to software releases — quarterly or annual updates suffice for educational accuracy. Sudden policy changes at an RIR may lag until the next dataset refresh.

Network training courses illustrate why CIDR superseded classful addressing and why NAT became ubiquitous. The animated bars give non-technical stakeholders an intuitive picture without reading RFC documents.

Embed screenshots in IPv6 migration proposals. Pair discussion with our bogon checker and subnet calculator tools so engineers connect exhaustion to daily design tasks.

This is not a live RIR API feed. Exact remaining counts change when LIRs return unused blocks or complete transfers. Percentages round for display.

The tool runs entirely client-side after load — no server query, no personal data, no rate limits. Refresh the page after we publish dataset updates to see revised numbers.