A routing management component is provided for distributing routing information among a hierarchical distributed routing architecture. The routing management component can function to associate levels of the routing architecture with subsets of a network address format. The routing management component can further assign routers of the routing architecture to portions of network addresses defined at least in part by the network address format. For example, a router may be assigned to route packets addressed to a network address with a first octet between a range of values. The router management component may further distribute, to the routers of the hierarchical distributed routing architecture, sections of routing information associated with their assigned portions of network addresses. Because routing information can be distributed between various routers, the memory requirements of individual routers can be reduced comparatively to systems in which a single router maintains an entire set of forwarding information.