.ca domain names

What .ca is

.ca is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Canada, registered directly at the second level as yourname.ca. Provincial third-level namespaces such as .on.ca, .qc.ca and .bc.ca still resolve, but CIRA stopped accepting new registrations under them on 12 October 2010.

The registry is the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), a Canadian not-for-profit based in Ottawa, incorporated on 30 December 1998, to which ICANN redelegated .ca on 1 December 2000. There has been no change of operator since. CIRA is unusual in that it built and runs its own registry platform, Fury, launched as a commercial backend service in July 2016 and now sold to other registries including .kiwi, .sx and .ie.

The extension was allocated on 14 May 1987 by Jon Postel to John Demco at the University of British Columbia, and the first registration, in January 1988, went to the University of Prince Edward Island. CIRA's site reported 3,596,444 registered domains on a page dated 3 December 2024; that is a 2024 figure, so the safe statement is that .ca is over 3.5 million domains.

Who can register .ca

.ca is restricted to registrants who satisfy CIRA's Canadian Presence Requirements. In scope these are the strictest rules in the country-code group, because they cover every registration with no unrestricted fallback namespace. In definition they are broad: the policy sets out eighteen qualifying categories, and a registrant needs to fit only one.

• Canadian citizen, of the age of majority in their province or territory.
• Permanent resident, ordinarily resident in Canada and of the age of majority.
• Legal representative - an executor, administrator or other legal representative of an eligible person.
• Corporation incorporated under the laws of Canada or of any province or territory.
• Trust established under provincial or territorial law, where more than 66.6 per cent of trustees are eligible.
• Partnership registered provincially or territorially, where more than 66.6 per cent of partners are eligible.
• Unincorporated association where at least 80 per cent of members and at least 80 per cent of directors, officers and employees are Canadian-based.
• Trade union recognised by a labour board, with its head office in Canada.
• Political party registered under a relevant Canadian electoral law.
• Educational institution - a university, college or school located in Canada.
• Library, archive or museum located in Canada, non-profit, holding public collections.
• Hospital located in Canada and licensed, authorised or approved.
• His or Her Majesty the King or Queen and successors.
• Indian band as defined in the Indian Act.
• Aboriginal Peoples - Inuit, First Nations and Metis groups and individuals indigenous to Canada.
• Government entities at federal, provincial, territorial or municipal level.
• Owner of a trade mark registered in Canada under the Trade-marks Act.
• Holder of a published official mark.

The trade mark route is the only path open to a non-Canadian, and it is narrower than it looks. It requires a registered Canadian mark, not a pending application, and the domain must consist of or correspond to that mark; it does not license a foreign company to register arbitrary Canadian domains. Registrars transmit indicative legal-type codes such as CCT for a citizen, RES for a permanent resident and COR for a corporation, but CIRA's eighteen categories are what governs.

CIRA audits, and revocation is a genuine outcome rather than a theoretical one. The process is Registrant Information Validation. Selection is at CIRA's discretion, with no published trigger, and can arrive years after registration. On selection CIRA locks the domain, so no transfer and no contact update is possible. A first notice requests documentation supporting the claimed category; a second follows ten business days later, granting five additional days. If nothing is received, the domain is suspended for up to thirty days, and CIRA is blunt about the effect: your website and email will not function. Thirty days later, a cancellation notice states the date on which the domain will be cancelled and released to the public on a first come, first served basis.

Note the compounding failure mode built into that sequence. Every notice goes to the registrant email on file, and suspension kills the domain's own email. A registrant using an address at their own .ca can be cut off from precisely the messages explaining how to save it.

What .ca costs to own

CIRA is a member-based non-profit and sets a single flat wholesale fee per domain-year. There is no promotional first-year registry price, no tiered renewal structure and no registry premium name tier. Any difference between a first-year price and a renewal price is your registrar's decision, and no CIRA wholesale price change has been verified for 2024 to 2026.

Restoration after expiry costs materially more than a renewal. A .ca that is not renewed passes through an auto-renew grace period of around forty-five days, then into a thirty-day Redemption Grace Period, the window during which only the original registrant can restore the name and a restore fee applies; registrar documentation cites slightly different day counts, so treat CIRA's rules as authoritative. After redemption the name goes to CIRA's To Be Released list, where participating registrars compete for it as it drops - a structured, registry-run process rather than an aftermarket auction.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

Terms run from one year to ten, with a hard ten-year forward horizon: CIRA's rules state that any renewal for a longer period is automatically reduced to ten years. Domains auto-renew for one year at expiry with the registrar charged automatically, so a .ca you forget about is more likely to generate an invoice than to lapse quietly.

Transfers use an authorisation code, with CIRA-specific rules. The registrant obtains the code from the current registrar, which must supply it within five business days. The gaining registrar submits the transfer, and registrar documentation reports that transfers complete effectively immediately rather than waiting out a five-day approval window. Importantly, the transfer extends the registration by one year, subject to the ten-year maximum - the opposite of the .co.uk position.

CIRA's rules bar transfers within sixty days of registration or of a prior transfer, and some registrars apply a longer window. Expired domains can generally still be transferred within thirty days of expiry, and a domain under Registrant Information Validation is locked until validation closes.

Two provisions are specific to .ca. Since 25 May 2018 a transfer carries a Canadian Presence Requirements declaration, so eligibility is restated rather than merely inherited. And a registrar may not transfer a domain away because the registrant owes it money, while municipal domains need CIRA's written consent. If your .ca uses accented French characters, all variants in the bundle must transfer together or the transfer fails.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

.ca handles privacy in a way that surprises buyers, and it cuts in the opposite direction from .us. WHOIS is published at whois.cira.ca and RDAP at CIRA's Fury endpoint, listed in the IANA record.

Individuals get privacy automatically, free, by default. For a registrant in an individual category, meaning a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, legal representative or Aboriginal person, CIRA's public WHOIS returns a notice that personal information about the holder is not available because the registration is privacy protected. Nobody buys anything and nobody ticks a box.

Organisations get no such protection. For a corporation, association, government body or other non-individual registrant, the registrant name and the administrative and technical contacts are displayed by default. If privacy is available to an organisation at all, it is a registrar product.

The trap is common. A sole trader who registers under their incorporated company rather than as themselves loses the free privacy, and CIRA cannot restore it: the registry is explicit that it cannot modify privacy settings. Fixing it means going back to the registrar to change the presence category, which is a registrant data change rather than a toggle. Decide which entity should hold the domain before you register. To reach a private registrant, CIRA operates a Message Delivery Form that relays a message without disclosing contact details.

Technically, .ca is DNSSEC signed with a DS record in the root and a published DNSSEC Practice Statement; CIRA signed the zone in January 2013 and introduced IDNs for French diacritics at the same time. Registrar support for both is inconsistent: at least one reseller platform documents .ca IDNs as unavailable, and at least one large retail registrar disables DNSSEC and vanity nameservers for .ca. Those are registrar limitations, not CIRA limitations.

Who .ca suits, and who should avoid it

.ca suits Canadian businesses, non-profits, institutions and individuals, and carries strong domestic trust because CIRA markets it as a Canadian identity signal rather than merely an address. It is particularly good for individuals, who receive free WHOIS privacy by default - something they would not get on .us at any price. It also suits a foreign company holding a registered Canadian trade mark that wants the exact-match name.

Avoid it if you cannot honestly fit a presence category. Registering through a Canadian friend, employee or agency puts the domain in their legal name, because CIRA validates the registrant of record and not the beneficial owner, and if validation fails the name is cancelled and released to the public. Avoid it too if your business is global and you would rather not attach a country-specific signal.

Common mistakes with .ca

• Using a Canadian proxy registrant. The registrant of record must qualify, and whoever is named in that field owns the domain in law. The trade mark route is the only legitimate non-Canadian path, and it covers only the mark itself.
• Using an on-domain email address as the registrant contact. Every validation notice goes to the registrant email, and suspension stops the domain's own email working. Use an address on a completely different domain.
• Incorporating and then wondering why your details are public. Individual registrants get free WHOIS privacy; corporations do not. Changing it afterwards means changing the presence category with your registrar, and CIRA cannot do it for you.
• Assuming a registrar limitation is a registry limitation. If your registrar says .ca does not support DNSSEC, vanity nameservers or accented domains, it is describing its own platform. CIRA supports all three.

Thirteen years, one volunteer, one university

For the first thirteen years of its life .ca was run by one man. John Demco, at the University of British Columbia's computer science department, took the delegation from Jon Postel on 14 May 1987 and administered the namespace as unpaid volunteer stewardship until CIRA assumed operations on 1 December 2000. Registrations were approved manually, one at a time, against a rigid hierarchy that pushed most applicants into provincial and municipal third levels, so a Toronto business ended up beneath on.ca rather than holding a plain second-level name. At handover there were about 120,000 domains - a remarkably small number for a G7 country thirteen years in.

CIRA replaced that with a modern first-come, first-served registry. The millionth domain arrived on 15 April 2008, new provincial registrations closed in October 2010, and the zone was signed for DNSSEC in January 2013. The provincial namespaces are now frozen in amber: no new names since 2010, but every one registered before that date still resolves, so a .on.ca or .qc.ca encountered in the wild is provably at least fifteen years old.

The other thing CIRA did with its independence was build software. Fury now runs .ie for Ireland along with .kiwi and .sx, putting a Canadian non-profit into competition with Verisign, Identity Digital and Tucows in the registry backend market. Very few country-code registries have turned operational capability into an export business, and it helps explain why CIRA's technical decisions tend to arrive ahead of its peers.