In 1993, RIP version 2 was developed to deal with the limitations of RIP v1. It was not standardized until 1998. This new version supports classless routing, and subnets of various sizes.

Router authentication was added in RIP v2 — it supports MD5. MD5 hashes are an older encryption method, but this is much improved over no security at all.

In RIP v2 the hop count limit remained at 15 to be backwards compatible with RIP v1.

RIP v2 uses multicasting to send the entire routing table to router neighbors, thereby reducing the traffic for devices that are not participating in RIP routing.

Routing tags were added as well, which allow internal routes or redistributed routes to be identified as such.