How this is calculated

With roughly 1,000 usable addresses, a /22 comfortably handles a mid-size office of 200-300 employees, each with a laptop, phone, and maybe a couple of lab or test devices. The broadcast domain at this size is manageable on modern switched networks. A /22 is the most common subnet size for cloud VPC deployments where you want each availability zone to have room for auto-scaling without running out of IPs during a scale-out event.

Verdict

A /22 is the practical ceiling for a single broadcast domain in 2026. Bigger subnets (/21, /20) start to suffer from broadcast chatter on anything but the most carefully designed networks. For a growing office or a cloud subnet that needs headroom, /22 hits the sweet spot between address abundance and network hygiene.