In this paper we have proposed a class of estimators for the variance of the ratio estimator which includes two standard estimators V ₀, V ₂ and the estimators V_H and V ₃ suggested by Royall and Eberhardt (1975) and Wu (1982) respectively. Under large sample approximation, the bias and mean-squared error of the proposed class of estimators are obtained. Based on this we obtain optimal variance estimator in the class and compare the relative merits with a number of estimators. For illustration an empirical study is provided. Here we confine ourselves to sampling scheme SRSWOR ignoring finite population correction.