Why AWS Is Starting to Charge for Public IPv4 Addresses – What It Means for You

IPv4 address exhaustion

IPv4 uses 32‑bit addresses, giving a total of about 4.3 billion unique addresses. By November 2019 the RIPE NCC announced that the global IPv4 pool was exhausted, meaning no new allocations for ISPs or large networks. Over the past two decades the rapid growth of smartphones, PCs and IoT devices consumed nearly all of these addresses, and the market price for a public IPv4 address has risen by more than 300 % in the last five years.

AWS public IPv4 address charge

Effective 1 February 2024 AWS charges $0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address, regardless of whether the address is attached to a running service. The fee applies to all AWS regions (commercial, China and GovCloud) and to all services that allocate public IPs such as EC2, RDS and EKS.

The annual cost per address is calculated as:

hourly_rate = 0.005
hours_per_year = 24 * 365
annual_cost = hourly_rate * hours_per_year  # ≈ $43.80 per IPv4 address per year

Mitigation options

Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) : customers can import their own IPv4 address ranges into AWS; BYOIP addresses are exempt from the hourly charge.

Free tier : for the first 12 months AWS provides 750 hours of public IPv4 usage per month at no charge.

Public IP Insights : a feature of AWS VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) that lists every public IPv4 address owned by an account, showing allocation state, tags and usage metrics. Users can filter, sort and export the list to identify idle or under‑utilised addresses.

IPv6 adoption context

IPv6 uses a 128‑bit address space, offering roughly 3.4 × 10³⁸ possible addresses. It provides benefits such as simplified routing, built‑in IPsec, and elimination of NAT. Google’s latest data indicate that more than 42 % of Internet users now reach services over IPv6, yet the global IPv4 routing table still contains about six times more entries than the IPv6 table.

Key challenges to IPv6 migration include:

IPv4 and IPv6 are not directly interoperable; dual‑stack deployments or translation mechanisms are required.

Many development tools, CI/CD pipelines and third‑party services (e.g., GitHub, Docker registries) assume IPv4 connectivity, making IPv6‑only environments difficult to operate.

Operational complexity when refactoring existing workloads to run on IPv6‑only networks.

Reference URLs

https://aws.amazon.com/cn/blogs/aws/new-aws-public-ipv4-address-charge-public-ip-insights/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/ipam/what-it-is-ipam.html

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/31/aws_says_ipv4_addresses_cost/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36942424