.ch domain names

What .ch is

.ch is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Switzerland, the abbreviation coming from the Latin Confoederatio Helvetica. It was delegated on 20 May 1987, making it one of the older ccTLDs in the root. Ownership and operation are separated: the Federal Office of Communications - OFCOM, known in Switzerland as BAKOM - is the regulator and holds .ch on behalf of the Swiss Confederation, and assigns no names directly. The registry function is delegated, and the delegate is SWITCH, the Swiss Education and Research Network.

Reports that .ch has changed hands are wrong: SWITCH won a public tender in 2016, that mandate was extended through the end of 2026, and on 30 January 2026 OFCOM renewed it again - this time delegating directly, without a new tender - for an initial five-year term from 1 January 2027, renewable once. SWITCH runs the registry database, the DNS and the registrar channel, and is barred from selling to end customers; around 170 registrars are accredited. Note that .swiss is a different extension, managed by OFCOM itself and subject to genuine Swiss-link requirements. The last precisely dated register size is 2,564,228 domains at 15 January 2024, with roughly 85% of holders in Switzerland.

Who can register .ch

There is no Swiss presence requirement, and there never has been. Article 45(b) of the Ordinance on Internet Domains provides that names subordinate to .ch may be allocated to or used by any physical and moral person - any natural or legal person, anywhere. Article 47 makes allocation first-come, first-served and states that the registry does not check the merits of an applicant's rights to the string. The registry says so plainly, and even warns the public not to infer nationality from the extension, since roughly 15% of holders are abroad.

The confusion arises from conditional correspondence-address rules, none of which is a registration prerequisite. If a Swiss authority acting within its competence so requests, the registry will ask a holder without a valid Swiss correspondence address to designate one within 30 days; and a foreign-domiciled party contesting a refusal or a revocation must supply such an address to pursue the formal procedure. A Swiss touchpoint is compelled only when an authority intervenes - materially different from a local presence rule, which is why trustee services for .ch are unnecessary. Identity accuracy is enforced, however: the registry may block a registration where it has reasonable grounds to believe an applicant is providing false identification, and must revoke if the holder fails to disclose their correct identity within 30 days. Names run from three to 63 characters, two-letter names are reserved for the cantons and federal use, and Swiss municipality names are registrable only by the municipality concerned.

What .ch costs to own

Wholesale pricing is regulated rather than market-set. Article 38 of the Ordinance provides that the price registrars pay annually per domain, for registration and administration of the data, is fixed in the delegation contract - a negotiated term of the OFCOM mandate rather than something SWITCH sets unilaterally, with adjustments permitted where the delegated tasks change, calculated on the basis of changes in costs.

Retail is fully liberalised: Article 22 states that registrars are free to fix the price of their registration services. With one regulated wholesale input and around 170 competing resellers, retail dispersion is wide, and because the registry charge is a flat annual per-domain fee with no premium list, any gap between a first-year price and a renewal price is entirely a retailer's construction. Compare renewal pricing, not headline pricing. Recovery after deletion runs through a 40-day transition period during which no third party can register the name, with a restore path available; a restore is priced by registrars well above a normal annual fee, and it is triggered by a registrar-side billing lapse rather than by any registry expiry.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

.ch does not use the one-to-ten-year term structure that generic extensions use. It has no term at all. The general terms state that registration for a holder is generally for an unlimited period, and that a registration ends with deletion or transfer. There is no expiry date in the registry and no renewal event. The point is made concretely in the technical interface: the EPP renew command is not implemented for .ch and is rejected as an unimplemented command, because renewal is performed by the server. A registrar cannot renew a .ch, because there is nothing to renew. What exists instead is an annual charge levied by the registry on the registrar, so the one year an end customer sees on an invoice is a registrar billing cycle, and multi-year offers are a registrar-side prepayment construct with no registry counterpart.

For anyone running a multi-country portfolio this is the detail that causes trouble. There is no registry expiry date to synchronise, no auto-renew grace period of the sort gTLDs provide, and no registry-side warning. The date that can lose you the domain is the registrar's payment and cancellation deadline. If a registrar-side payment lapses and a delete is issued, the name enters a 40-day transition period during which nobody at all - including the former holder - can re-register it. .de and .nl share this indefinite-term model; .eu, .es, .fr and .it do not. A portfolio spreadsheet with an expiry column will simply have blanks for .ch, and those blanks are where the risk sits.

Transfers use an EPP authorisation code, not a paper or PDF form; any guide describing a fax form is out of date. The holder asks the current registrar to set a code on the domain object, and the gaining registrar submits the transfer with it. The transfer executes immediately and automatically: there is no approval phase, no acknowledge-or-reject cycle and no pending window, and the losing registrar is merely notified afterwards. Three consequences follow. A leaked code is effectively a transferred domain, so codes are credentials. After a transfer the domain carries a 60-day transfer prohibition that clears automatically. And a DNSSEC-signed .ch cannot be transferred to a registrar that does not support DNSSEC.

Changing the holder is separate. The holder may transfer a name to a third party through the managing registrar; consent of the former holder is required, and the proof is retained by the registrar rather than filed with the registry. SWITCH runs .li for Liechtenstein on the same platform, so all of this applies there too.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

.ch publishes no holder data at all, and this is mandated by Swiss ordinance rather than chosen as registry policy. Article 46 requires the directory to carry only the domain name and its ACE string, nameserver data where activated, whether the domain is DNSSEC-protected, the date of first allocation, and the name, address and contact data of the registrar. Since 1 January 2021 the registry has disclosed no personal data associated with registered domain names.

The split model used by .de, .fr, .nl and .eu - individuals hidden, companies published - does not apply here. Article 46(2) permits publication of holder identification data where the holder is a legal entity, or where the holder consents, but SWITCH surfaces no publication or consent toggle: the opt-in exists in law and not in the product. Natural persons and legal entities alike get nothing published, which makes .ch stricter than most gTLD redaction regimes and stricter than every other major European ccTLD, corporate holders included. Third parties are not without recourse: Article 46(3) requires the registry to grant access to holder personal data free of charge to anyone who credibly claims an overriding legitimate interest. Privacy and proxy services are consequently pointless for .ch, and actively risky, since misstating the true holder exposes the registration to revocation.

RDAP exists but is not discoverable: a query to rdap.nic.ch returns a conformant object with the registrar entity present and the holder entity entirely absent, but .ch is not listed in the IANA bootstrap file, so client autodiscovery fails and the endpoint must be configured by hand. SWITCH signed .ch with DNSSEC in 2010, the same year the root zone was signed, using ECDSA keys with annual key-signing-key and monthly zone-signing-key rollovers - and access to key material is a three-of-five split shared between SWITCH staff and BAKOM, so the regulator literally holds key shares. Internationalised names are supported across accented Latin characters covering all four national languages and extending to Nordic and Icelandic letters.

Who .ch suits, and who should avoid it

.ch suits any business targeting the Swiss market, where it is the dominant extension among Swiss registrants, and foreign companies wanting a Swiss-market presence without a Swiss entity, since the extension is genuinely open. It suits registrants who value privacy by default, because nothing is published for anyone and the position is fixed by ordinance rather than by a policy a registry could reverse. It suits security-sensitive operators, given early DNSSEC deployment and a Registry Lock, and anyone wanting a set-and-forget registration with no registry expiry to miss.

It is the wrong choice for anyone who needs the domain itself to certify Swiss origin. A .ch proves nothing about its holder, and the registry says so explicitly; .swiss, which requires proof of a sufficient link with Switzerland, is the extension that does that job. It is a poor fit for anyone relying on public directory data for due diligence or brand monitoring, and teams whose tooling depends on IANA bootstrap discovery for RDAP will need manual configuration. Anyone expecting a UDRP will not find one; .ch has its own dispute rules and pushes trademark conflicts to Swiss civil law.

Common mistakes with .ch

Treating it like a generic extension with an expiry date. There is no registry expiry and no renew command. The registry bills the registrar annually and the registrar bills you, so the only date that matters is the registrar's. If a registrar-side payment lapses and a delete is issued, the name enters a 40-day transition period during which nobody - including the former holder - can re-register it.

Assuming a losing registrar can stall a transfer. There is no pending window and no acknowledge-or-reject cycle: a correct authorisation code executes the transfer immediately, so codes must be treated as credentials. Remember also that a completed transfer locks the name against further transfer for 60 days, and that a DNSSEC-signed .ch cannot move to a registrar that does not support DNSSEC.

Buying .ch expecting it to signal or require Swiss status. Two mirror-image errors are common: foreign registrants paying for a local presence service the ordinance does not require, and buyers assuming a .ch counterparty is Swiss when roughly 15% of holders are not. The related trap is that no requirement is not the same as no Swiss touchpoint ever - a foreign-domiciled holder contesting a refusal or revocation must supply a valid Swiss correspondence address.

From the university network to the national namespace

.ch and its registry are exact contemporaries, and both came out of the academic sector. The domain was delegated on 20 May 1987. SWITCH - the Swiss Education and Research Network - was founded in the same year as a private non-profit foundation, created jointly by the Swiss Confederation and eight university cantons to run the network connecting Swiss higher education and research. Bernhard Plattner introduced .ch in 1987 and handed it to the foundation, and the first three Swiss addresses registered were cern.ch, ethz.ch and switch.ch: a particle physics laboratory, a federal institute of technology, and the network operator itself.

The dates around the handover deserve care, because sources differ for good reasons. IANA records delegation in 1987, SWITCH dates its own operation of the registry from 1990, and root DNS entry is dated to late 1991, with complete domain-inventory figures existing only from November 1999. All three are correct about different things - the delegation, the operational registry, and the infrastructure - and the honest version is that .ch drifted into being a managed namespace over several years rather than launching on a date.

What is striking is how long the academic arrangement held. SWITCH was not spun off, privatised or sold. It remained a foundation belonging to the universities, describing itself as keeping distance from commercial interests, while the namespace beneath it grew into a commercial register of millions of names. For most of that period SWITCH was both registry and registrar, selling .ch directly to end customers - a national research foundation running the retail counter for an entire country's domain market. That ended with the Ordinance on Internet Domains, in force from 1 January 2015, which separated the functions and pushed end customers to registrars.

The governance that emerged is unusually explicit about the state's role: OFCOM owns the namespace on behalf of the Confederation and delegates its operation, the wholesale price is a contractual term of that delegation, the ordinance rather than the registry decides what may be published about holders, and the regulator physically holds a share of the DNSSEC key material. When the mandate came up again, OFCOM chose in January 2026 to renew directly rather than tender, citing operational continuity, security requirements and a stakeholder survey showing high satisfaction, and weighing the costs and instability a change of operator would bring. Nearly forty years after eight university cantons founded a research network, the Swiss state's considered view is that the university foundation should carry on running the country's namespace.