Dear Rich, Thank you for your email. Allow me to provide some clarification. You are correct that policy transfers are based on the principles outlined in the RIPE Transfer policies. This is completed by requirements described in RIPE NCC procedures. The RIPE NCC must perform checks for each request, for example for due diligence or if the member has fulfilled all essential obligations. For policy transfers and other changes of holdership of resources registered to a member, one of these obligations is that their annual membership fee has been paid. This is a long-standing practice. The only change this year is that the RIPE NCC no longer issues preliminary annual invoices for members who want to transfer resources before the regular annual invoice is issued. In the past, we did this because the regular invoice was typically issued in February or later, and we wanted to avoid delaying holdership updates. However, this approach created significant administrative overhead, including generating preliminary invoices, reconciling them with the regular invoicing, and later redistributing any excess contribution from the previous financial year to that member. Instead, before the year end, the RIPE NCC focuses on working to ensure all changes of holdership can be facilitated, while issuing the regular annual invoice as early as possible in the new year. This balances the ability to handle the end of year ticket peak and it allows members to pay their annual fee early in the year ensuring timely access to all services that require a paid membership fee. In fact, these invoices have already been issued today to the membership. As soon as your payment has been received, the policy transfer can be completed. So to conclude: we try to balance the ability to handle the end-of-year peak and issuing invoices early in the year to reduce the potential period in which your scenario exists and to reduce our administrative effort that comes with being more flexible. Regards, -- Gabor de Wit Chief Registry Officer | RIPE NCC ---------------------------------------------- On Mon, 12 Jan 2026 at 15:45, Patterson, Richard (Senior IP Architect) via members-discuss <members-discuss@ripe.net> wrote:
Hi Members,
We've hit a kafkaesque bug with the RIPE NCC's policies, and I was wondering if anyone else has run into it?
We've had a resource transfer request blocked until the 2026 membership fees are all paid up, the 2026 membership fees for which the invoices have not yet been generated or sent out yet.........
This requirement is not specified in the Transfer Policy, but it is mentioned in the 2026 Billing Procedure.
Do we think this requirement—effectively restricting transfers during the month of January—is sane and I just need to be more patient, or does it require a policy update or maybe just for a bit of common sense to be applied when requests are processed?
-Rich
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