In this paper we have proposed a class of estimators for the variance of the ratio estimator which includes two standard estimators V0, V2 and the estimators VH and V3 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.