Best IP leasing companies in 2026: the market, compared

The market has three shapes

Every provider in this piece will rent you address space, but they are structurally different businesses, and the structure decides what you are actually buying.

• Marketplaces connect independent IP holders with lessees and automate the paperwork in between. You lease somebody else's space through their platform, and the platform's quality shows in the automation: LOAs, route objects, RPKI, WHOIS, abuse handling.
• Operator lessors lease space they hold themselves. One counterparty, one pool, no marketplace variance, and the block's past is the operator's own past.
• Brokers match you with a lessor from their network and negotiate terms. Less automation, more hand-holding, and useful when your requirement is odd: a specific region, a specific size, an option to buy later.

What actually separates providers

Price per address is the number everyone compares, and it is the least interesting difference. These are the ones that bite later:

• Paperwork automation. Whether LOA, route objects, ROA and WHOIS updates happen programmatically at activation or over email across days.
• Abuse handling. Who answers the abuse mailbox for the leased range, how fast, and what happens to you when a complaint lands.
• Vetting on both sides. A platform that verifies its lessees is protecting its holders' address space. A platform that verifies its holders is protecting you from leasing space that was never theirs to rent.
• Geolocation support. Leased ranges routinely geolocate to the holder's country rather than yours; a provider that publishes geofeeds and chases the databases saves you weeks.
• Exit terms. Notice periods, renewal mechanics, refund policy. The time to read them is before the block carries production traffic.
• The space itself. None of the above tells you what the addresses were doing last year. That check is yours, and it is the subject of the last section.

The marketplaces: IPXO and InterLIR

IPXO

IPXO is the largest dedicated leasing marketplace and the closest thing this market has to a default. Spun out of Heficed in 2021 and run from Lithuania, it reported more than 8 million addresses under management in late 2025, with several million actively leased from hundreds of independent holders across all five registry regions, and took outside investment in October 2025 to fund North American expansion. It is leasing only: no buying or selling.

The pitch is automation and both-sided vetting. Every business is KYC-verified before it can lease or monetise; LOA, ROA, WHOIS and IRR route objects are issued programmatically at activation; the platform monitors abuse and reputation continuously, and ARIN's blog has covered its abuse operation handling tens of thousands of incidents a quarter with a small manual remainder. Blocks run from /24 (the minimum) to /16, on rolling monthly leases or longer fixed commitments. Holders set their own prices and pay a 5% platform fee; lessees pay a platform fee from $9 per /24 per month on top of the lease rate, and IPXO's own reporting put average lease prices around $0.40 per address per month in 2025.

Honesty requires one more paragraph: in September 2023 hosting providers publicly pushed back on an abuse policy that charged a fee for manually handled incidents beyond two per month, and IPXO suspended the fee that November. Worth knowing, and also worth knowing that the company reversed course when its customers objected.

InterLIR

InterLIR, a Berlin GmbH on the commercial register since 2021, is the other dedicated marketplace brand, visibly smaller than IPXO and unusual in running two storefronts: the original interlir.com and the newer interlir.global, which also brokers purchases and sales alongside leasing. Minimum unit is a /24, blocks run to /16, and verification is business-only: the company states plainly that it does not work with individuals.

Its published numbers, as of August 2026: leases from 89 to 106 EUR per month for a /24 depending on which of its pages you read (roughly $0.35 to $0.49 per address), a 20% leasing commission on the global platform's fee schedule, with the .com site marketing holders a retained 80 to 85% of rental income. The platform configures route objects, ROA and WHOIS for leased ranges, advertises same-day LOA from its own inventory, runs the abuse mailbox during the lease, supports geolocation change requests, and documents BYOIP into AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, OVHcloud and IBM Cloud. One caveat its own guide states: ARIN does not process leasing-based requests, so lease paperwork is shallower in the ARIN region than in RIPE.

The operator lessors: Cogent and LARUS

Cogent

Cogent Communications is the heavyweight nobody thinks of as an IP leasing company, and its numbers are the most audited in this piece because they are in SEC filings: $18.0 million of IPv4 leasing revenue in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up 24.8% year on year, and the leasing book has been securitised twice, roughly $206 million of IPv4-backed notes in 2024 and a further $174 million in 2025. Broker estimates put its holdings near 38 million addresses with about 15 million leased out, at rates commonly cited around $0.20 to $0.45 per address per month. One counterparty, an enormous pool of its own space, and terms negotiated like the carrier contract it is. The trade-off is that you are dealing with a transit carrier's sales process, not a self-service marketplace.

LARUS

LARUS is a first-party lessor founded in 2016, claiming around 10 million addresses under management across all five registry regions, advertising leases from about $0.49 per address per month, and launching a marketplace of its own (i.LEASE) in 2026. It is a genuine operator at real scale, and it comes with context a review would be dishonest to omit: its founder is also the figure behind Cloud Innovation, whose roughly 6.2 million AFRINIC-allocated addresses and their leasing outside the region set off years of litigation, at times dozens of lawsuits, that The Register has chronicled through AFRINIC's governance crisis and receivership. None of that makes a lease from LARUS misrouted or unusable. It is exactly the kind of fact the last section of this piece is about: the history around address space is part of what you are leasing.

The brokers: IPv4.Global, Prefix Broker and the channel

IPv4.Global

IPv4.Global, the Hilco Streambank division, is the best-known name in IPv4 sales and runs the market's most transparent public price data. Leasing became a formal product in September 2024 with its Leasing Hub, including lease-to-own and option-to-buy structures. If your lease is really a deferred purchase, the broker whose business is purchases, and whose price history you can read before signing, is a sensible place to structure it.

Prefix Broker

Prefix Broker, a long-standing Dutch firm rooted in the RIPE community, brokers leases from lessors in its network across all five regions, with blocks usable within 24 hours of first payment. It is also the rare broker that simply publishes its lease prices: as of August 2026, a /24 at 129 EUR per month, a /22 at 499, a /21 at 949, and an IPv6 /32 at 49. Dearer per address than the marketplaces, and you are paying for a counterparty that answers email and has a reputation older than the leasing market.

The channel, and the rest

Several familiar brokerage names, Brander Group and IPTrading among them, offer leasing partly as a channel over IPXO's platform, which both have said publicly. That is not a criticism; it does mean the operational experience underneath is the marketplace's. Hosting operators lease too, at hosting prices: LogicWeb, for example, lists a /24 at $175 per month with a strict no-refund policy. And newer marketplaces keep appearing, IPbnb among them, leasing from $0.30 per address per month in the RIPE region but so far without disclosed scale. New entrants deserve the same test as old ones: verifiable claims, published terms, and someone who answers the abuse mailbox.

What leasing costs in 2026

As of mid-2026, published lease rates cluster between $0.30 and $0.50 per address per month for a /24, drifting lower for large blocks and higher for APNIC-region space, which has traded above $0.60. Purchase prices, for comparison, run roughly $28 to $45 per address for a /24, so a /24 costs on the order of $100 to $130 a month to lease against $7,000 to $9,000 to buy. At those numbers a lease pays for the purchase in about five to six years, which is the honest way to frame the decision: leasing wins on time-to-live, flexibility and not carrying an asset; buying wins if the space is core and permanent. All of these figures move, and moved sharply in the last two years: large-block purchase prices fell to ten-year lows through 2025 before turning upward in mid-2026. Treat any specific number, including these, as a dated observation rather than a promise.

Whoever you choose, check the range itself

Every provider above will tell you about their platform. None of their marketing will tell you what the specific addresses you are about to lease were doing in March, and that is the part that decides whether your mail delivers and your signups clear, because reputation attaches to the address, not to the contract.

So before the lease starts, run the same checks a buyer would run: read the block's history, its origin churn, and what independent feeds have said about the addresses inside it on the dates they were sampled. Look up the exact prefix on the front page and read what comes back before you put your name on it. If it will send mail, plan the remediation and warm-up before go-live, not after the first bounce. And if you are on the other side of this market, with space to rent out, the same history tools are how you watch what a lessee does to your addresses while the lease runs, and how you read the network they will announce from before it starts.