RFC 1918 · BEST CURRENT PRACTICE · 1996
WED · 29 JUL 2026
Address Allocation for Private Internets
Overview
RFC 1918, “Address Allocation for Private Internets”, is a Best Current Practice document published in February 1996 by Y. Rekhter, B. Moskowitz, D. Karrenberg, G. J. de Groot, E. Lear. It obsoletes RFC 1597, RFC 1627. It has since been updated by RFC 6761. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
This document describes address allocation for private internets. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
What “Best Current Practice” means
Documents the IETF community's recommended operational or procedural practice rather than a protocol specification.
Read this RFC
The canonical text of RFC 1918 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
Relationships to other RFCs
Other RFCs from 1996
- RFC 1917 An Appeal to the Internet Community to Return Unused IP Networks to the IANA
- RFC 1919 Classical versus Transparent IP Proxies
- RFC 1916 Enterprise Renumbering: Experience and Information Solicitation
- RFC 1920 Internet Official Protocol Standards
- RFC 1915 Variance for The PPP Compression Control Protocol and The PPP Encryption Control Protocol
- RFC 1921 TNVIP Protocol
- RFC 1914 How to Interact with a Whois++ Mesh
- RFC 1922 Chinese Character Encoding for Internet Messages