Summary

  • ARIN’s 20 August 2026 revision would lower the in-region IPv4 threshold for out-of-region justification from /22 to /24; a /24 contains one sixteenth as many addresses as a /22.
  • The revision excludes the Waiting List, Micro-allocation Pool and Section 4.10 transition space from out-of-region justification, while preserving a transition rule for organizations already on the Waiting List when implementation occurs.
  • ARIN’s 23 February 2026 staff review assessed the 25 March 2025 text, not the August revision. Its workload and demand expectations therefore do not measure the current text.
  • The proposal remains a Draft Policy under discussion. It is not adopted, effective or implemented; both the draft timetable and staff estimate mention three months without establishing a date.

ARIN’s proposed change is easy to describe and easy to misread. The current revision would replace a /22 in-region IPv4-use threshold with /24 for justification of out-of-region space. Since a /24 is one sixteenth of a /22, the qualifying footprint would be materially smaller. The policy question is therefore not only whether an applicant crosses a binary gate, but what relationship exists between the qualifying in-region footprint and the amount requested for use outside the region.

The 20 August text also says that out-of-region justification may not be used for the ARIN Waiting List, the Micro-allocation Pool or Section 4.10 transition space. Organizations already on the Waiting List when implementation occurs would remain eligible under the rules in effect when they joined. The IPv6 /44 and ASN peering/router criteria are unchanged.

The staff/legal review dated 23 February 2026 examined the original 25 March 2025 draft. For that earlier text, staff said that one in-region /24 could justify substantially larger blocks used entirely outside the region, and anticipated more Waiting List requests, more out-of-region use and higher ticket workload. Those are attributed assessments of the earlier version. They do not assess the August exclusions, and the exclusions do not by themselves prove that the risks disappear. The frozen sources contain no fresh operational assessment of the latest revision.

BTW’s analysis is that the binary threshold should be accompanied by an exposure-ratio ledger: qualifying in-region footprint, requested out-of-region amount, excluded pool, Waiting List entry date and policy version. This is an analytical recommendation, not an existing or promised ARIN system. No source here quantifies current demand, identifies applicants or establishes abuse.

The Overview lists 6 September 2026 as the scheduled publication date. The actual server publication time remains unset until a publish action succeeds.