Two numbers, and only one of them repeats
Every row here carries at least two prices that people read as one. Registration is what you pay to create the domain, once. Renewal is what you pay every year afterward, for as long as you own the name. On some extensions the two sit close together. On others the first-year figure says nothing useful about the cost of ownership.
Plan around the renewal. It is the number that recurs, the one on a card statement three years from now when nobody remembers why, and the one that decides whether a portfolio is sustainable. To compare candidates, take the registration price once, add nine times the renewal, and compare totals. That ordering is often not the one the registration column suggests.
Hence the blunt version: the cheapest first year is a bad way to choose a domain. It optimizes for the one payment that never happens again, and favors the extensions with the widest first-year gap.
Where the gap comes from, and where it is widest
Two things create it. Some registries run promotional wholesale pricing, offering registrars a first year at a fraction of the standard rate to build volume. Separately, registrars set their own margin and can discount a first year out of pocket to win the customer. Where the wholesale fee is flat across a namespace, as at several country-code registries, the whole gap is registrar margin — and one you can usually improve by moving the domain.
The gap is widest on the discount-led extensions, and it shows in the renewal data. Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief for the second quarter of 2026 puts combined .com and .net renewals at 75.2%, legacy generic extensions at 67.2%, and new generic extensions at 31.0%; .xyz renews at 17.5% and .shop at 14.2%.
That describes a commercial model, not a verdict on extensions that have real long-term users. Names taken at a promotional rate are largely taken by people who never intended a second year, and the renewal that funds the promotion is priced accordingly — on several of them above what the default extension costs. Cheap once, more expensive every year after.
Premium names, and the renewal that comes with them
Registries reserve part of their namespace — short strings, dictionary words, obvious keywords — and price those names individually. That is a premium name. This table does not cover them; a premium price appears when you search the name.
What catches people is that a registry premium usually recurs: the tier sets registration, renewal, and transfer alike, every year, indefinitely, rather than acting as a one-time acquisition fee with an ordinary renewal behind it.
Usually is doing real work in that sentence. At least one large registry runs two premium models at once: one where registration, renewal, and transfer all sit at the premium rate permanently, and a tier introduced in 2018 where registration is premium but the name renews at the standard rate. Two names can look identical at purchase and behave differently for a decade, so check before buying. There is no registry premium tier in .com at all, so a habit formed there will mislead you elsewhere.
What a transfer buys, and what a restoration costs
A transfer looks administrative but is priced like a renewal. On most generic extensions the transfer adds a year to the registration term: you are not paying a handling fee, you are buying a year and changing provider at once. That is why the transfer column tracks the renewal column. Country-code registries vary: at least one major national registry moves domains by changing a registry-level identifier rather than an authorization code, charges nothing, and adds no time to the term.
Restoration is the other price missing from the table, and the one people meet on their worst day. After expiry a generic domain sits in an auto-renew grace period — standard practice is around 45 days — during which a renewal still fixes everything. Once the registrar issues the delete command the name enters the 30-day Redemption Grace Period required by ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy, and the domain goes dark: DNS resolution disabled, transfers prohibited. Recovery means a restore through the registrar you are already with, costing a registry restore fee plus the registrar's margin plus a renewal term. It runs substantially higher than a renewal and is the largest routine fee in the lifecycle. Registrars must publish it; look it up on a calm day.
Price increases, and when a longer term is worth buying
Registry increases reach registrants along a defined path. A registry must give registrars six months' notice before raising its wholesale fee, and during that window registrants may renew for up to ten years at the pre-increase rate. That is the most actionable pricing fact on this page, and the window closes. An expiry date may never sit more than ten years out, so a name with three years left can be extended by seven, not ten.
Contractual protection is rarer than buyers assume, and not the whole story: .org's caps were removed in 2019 over near-unanimous objection, and its wholesale price then stayed flat for a decade before moving once.
A long term converts recurring pricing risk into a fixed cost and removes years of lapsed-renewal risk, the more common way people lose domains. It is not always worth buying. A decade on an extension you are trialing buys certainty you do not need. A long term at a registrar whose renewal sits well above the market locks in that margin rather than protecting you from it, when moving would have fixed the problem.
The costs that sit outside the domain price
A domain is an entry in a registry; almost everything that makes it useful is billed somewhere else, so comparing registrars on renewal alone misleads you whenever the bundles differ.
- DNS hosting. Basic service is usually included; redundancy, low-latency global resolution, and an API are not.
- Email. Mailboxes are a separate product; forwarding is not hosted mail.
- Privacy and proxy services. Since ICANN's Registration Data Policy took full effect in August 2025, much registrant data is redacted from public lookups by default, with a relay email or web form published instead. What remains to check is whether a formal privacy service is offered, whether it is charged for, and whether it must come off before a transfer.
The comparison that holds is total annual cost for the domains you keep, with the services you use, at renewal rates. Sort by renewal rather than registration and a different ranking appears.