# RIR allocation

An RIR allocation is a block of IP addresses one of the five regional Internet registries handed to an operator, recorded with a country and a date in its daily statistics.

Date: 2026-09-12

An RIR allocation is a block of IP addresses that one of the five regional Internet registries — ARIN for North America, RIPE NCC for Europe and the Middle East, APNIC for Asia-Pacific, LACNIC for Latin America and AFRINIC for Africa — handed to a network operator, together with the country the registry recorded for it and the date it did so. Each registry publishes the whole ledger every day as its delegated-extended statistics file, which is the most authoritative public record of who was given which space and when.

## What Spaw answers

Three fields come straight out of those files: `registry` names the registry (`arin`, `ripencc`, `apnic`, `lacnic`, `afrinic`), `registry_country` the country it recorded, and `allocated_at` the date. They are facts about the block, not weights. `is_unallocated` is their negative: an address in none of the five files was never handed out and scores +100. A `registry_country` that disagrees with the geolocation is worth a second look, and a block allocated or transferred a few weeks ago is a classic tell in fraud reviews — the response states the date and leaves the judgement to you.

## What it does not mean

The registry's country is where the operator registered the block, which is not always where the addresses are used; a multinational's space can be registered in one country and deployed in twenty. That is exactly why it sits beside the geolocation rather than replacing it.

Reference: https://spaw.co/glossary/rir-allocation