How to read this table
Three prices matter and they are frequently different. Registration is what you pay to create the domain, and on many extensions it is discounted for the first year. Renewal is what you pay every year afterwards, and it is the number that describes your real cost of ownership. Transfer is what you pay to move the domain in from another registrar, which on most generic extensions also adds a year to the registration term.
Where the registration and renewal figures diverge sharply, that is a promotional first year. It is not deceptive — it is the standard commercial model for new extensions — but it means the headline price is not the price you will pay in year two.
What is not in this table
- Premium names. Registries reserve a portion of their namespace and price those names individually, sometimes at many multiples of the standard rate. A premium name will show its own price when you search for it.
- Restoration fees. Recovering a domain from the Redemption Grace Period costs substantially more than a renewal, because the registry charges a restore fee on top.
- Registry price changes. Registries may raise wholesale prices with six months' notice. When that happens you may renew for up to ten years at the pre-increase rate, which is worth acting on.
Cheap is not the same as inexpensive
The cheapest first-year price in this table is not the cheapest domain to own. Sort by renewal price to see the extensions that are genuinely low-cost over time, and compare that ordering against the registration column. The two lists are not the same, and the difference between them is the entire economics of the new extension market.
The arithmetic that matters is the ten-year cost, and it is easy to do in your head. Take the registration price once, add nine times the renewal price, and compare that figure between the names you are considering. An extension with a low introductory price and a high renewal will frequently cost more over a decade than one that looked expensive on day one. If you are choosing a name for a business you intend to still be running in ten years, that is the only comparison worth making.
Why extensions cost what they do
Retail pricing is built on three layers. The registry sets a wholesale fee for every registration, renewal, and transfer in its namespace, and that fee is governed by the registry agreement. ICANN adds a small per-transaction fee for generic extensions. The registrar adds its own margin, and that margin is where competition actually happens.
Wholesale fees vary enormously, and for reasons that have little to do with cost of operation. A registry that paid a very large sum at auction to win a contended extension has to recover that investment. A small territory operating its own country code may price to maximise national revenue. A legacy extension operating under a negotiated price cap is constrained in ways a new extension is not. The result is a market where two technically identical products can differ in price by more than an order of magnitude.
Country-code extensions sit outside ICANN's pricing framework entirely. Their operators set fees under national arrangements, and several are considerably cheaper than any generic extension because they are run by non-profit foundations, cooperatives, or public research bodies rather than commercial registries.
When a price increase is announced
This is the most actionable thing on the page. Under the base registry agreement, a registry must give registrars six months' notice before raising its wholesale price, and registrants may renew for up to ten years at the pre-increase rate before the increase takes effect. That window is a genuine, quantifiable saving on any extension with an announced increase, and it closes.
A domain's expiry date may never sit more than ten years in the future, so the maximum you can lock in depends on how much time is already on the clock. A name with three years remaining can be extended by seven, not by ten.
Transfers, and the year they usually add
Transferring a domain to a new registrar normally adds a year to the registration term, which means a transfer is closer to a renewal with a change of provider than to a pure administrative move. That is why the transfer price in this table is usually similar to the renewal price rather than being a small handling fee.
Country-code registries handle this differently. Several do not add a year on transfer at all, and several use transfer mechanisms that are nothing like the generic process. Check the individual extension page before assuming.