Described herein are systems, methods, and software to manage the compression of route tables for communication between networking elements. In one implementation, a network device identifies network keys for a route table by replacing attributes in the tables with values. The network device further generates a compressed route table using the route keys and associating each of the route keys with one or more additional attributes. The network device also generates a dictionary to associate each of the values for the route keys to a corresponding attribute of the attributes.