.co.uk domain names

What .co.uk is

.co.uk is not a top-level domain in its own right. It is a second-level namespace inside the .uk country code, which makes a registration under it, yourname.co.uk, technically a third-level registration. IANA delegates uk to Nominet; Nominet defines co.uk beneath it. There is no separate registry, no separate contract and no separate policy set.

It has existed since essentially the beginning of .uk in 1985, under the UK Naming Committee's hierarchy, and it predates Nominet itself, which was incorporated on 14 May 1996 to replace that manual, email-driven committee. Nominet UK, a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee based at Oxford Science Park, has operated it since.

Because .co.uk is administratively part of .uk, everything structural about it - the registry, the terms, the wholesale fee, the transfer mechanism - is identical to direct .uk. What is not identical is its position in the market. Roughly 9.3 million of the 10.5 million .uk-family registrations recorded in January 2024 sat at the third level, overwhelmingly in .co.uk. It is the default British web address by a wide margin.

One current development affects both forms. Nominet is migrating .uk to a new registry platform, with a replacement policy set dated 2026-03; its policy page gives 9 February 2027 for the change, while the registrar-facing page says the transition date will be announced. The current terms and rules of registration date from March 2025.

Who can register .co.uk

Nothing is required, and this bears stating plainly because buyers routinely assume otherwise. There is no UK residence requirement. There is no UK company requirement: no Companies House number, no VAT registration, no trading history. There is no local presence or agent requirement, and no documentation of any kind is collected at registration. A person in Sydney, Sao Paulo or Seattle can register one this afternoon. The co label nominally means commercial, but Nominet does not enforce that and never has.

What is required is accurate registrant data under Nominet's Data Quality Policy, along with compliance with the Terms and Conditions and Rules of Registration. A materially false registrant name or address is a breach that can cost you the domain, and since it is the only entry condition that exists, it is the only one Nominet has to enforce.

Disputes over .co.uk names go to Nominet's own Dispute Resolution Service rather than the UDRP, under a DRS Policy dating from October 2016. The DRS includes a free mediation stage before any fee-bearing expert decision, which is genuinely unusual: a substantial share of complaints settle at mediation without anyone paying for a decision.

What .co.uk costs to own

Nominet charges a flat wholesale fee per domain-year, and the same fee for a .co.uk as for a direct .uk. The shorter form carries no registry premium, and there is no registry-level premium name tier in the ordinary namespace.

The two-tier structure applies here as across .uk. Nominet members pay the per-annum wholesale rate for any term from one to ten years; non-members pay a substantially higher fixed rate for a two-year block, so buying through a non-member reseller costs more for no difference in what you receive. Registry increases have been rare and modest, the last announced on 1 October 2019 and effective 13 January 2020.

What buyers actually experience is a retail phenomenon. .co.uk is one of the most aggressively discounted first-year products in the UK market, and renewal rates at some registrars run to several multiples of the first-year price. Because the wholesale fee is flat and low, that whole gap is registrar margin, which has a useful consequence: you can nearly always improve your renewal cost by moving registrars, and a tag change carries no fee. If your renewal invoice looks steep, the problem is your registrar rather than the extension.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

Terms run from a minimum of one year to a maximum of ten, identical to direct .uk.

Transfers are where .co.uk departs most sharply from what a .com owner expects. There is no EPP authorization code. A .co.uk moves between registrars by changing its IPS tag. An IPS tag is a short identifier stored at the registry recording which registrar the domain currently sits with, written as strings such as NAME-COM, GODADDY or TUCOWS-UK. It is an attribute of the domain in Nominet's database rather than a secret handed to the registrant, so there is no code to copy and nothing to paste into a transfer form. If a support agent tells you they cannot find your auth code, they are right.

The process has three steps. The registrant asks the losing registrar to change the tag to the gaining registrar's tag, or makes the change directly in Nominet's own online service if they have Nominet account access. The change takes effect at the registry immediately, at which point the domain is on the new registrar's tag but not yet inside a customer account. The registrant then tells the gaining registrar the domain is on their tag, and the gaining registrar claims it into the account.

Three practical points follow. The request must come from the registrant contact of record at Nominet, not from whoever holds the registrar login - a recurring problem where a former web developer set the domain up. The tag change is free but adds no time: it includes no renewal and leaves the expiry date where it was. And because the change is instant and one-directional, a domain can sit on a registrar's tag unclaimed until somebody completes the third step.

This is scheduled to change. The .UK Inter-registrar Transfer Policy dated 2026-03 replaces tags with a Transfer Authorisation Code: the losing registrar must remove locks and supply the code within five days at no charge, and the registry validates and completes the transfer immediately, with an optional renewal of one to ten years. Nominet's stated date is 9 February 2027.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

.co.uk records are published at whois.nic.uk, with RDAP at rdap.nominet.uk. Privacy is where .co.uk is materially better for individuals than most country codes. Registrar-operated privacy services are permitted under Nominet's supervised model: the registrar holds your true details and publishes its own instead, and in exchange must act as address for service and handle abuse complaints. It is a substitution of a responsible party, not anonymity.

Better still for individuals, since 1 September 2015 a registrant who is a natural person and whose domain is not used for business may opt their address out of WHOIS for free. The test is that the domain must not transact with customers and must not primarily advertise or promote goods, services or facilities, and Nominet explicitly widened it so that small personal sites carrying affiliate links or pay-per-click advertising remain eligible. That is a real advantage over .us, where privacy is banned outright. The limits are firm, though: anyone trading through the domain is excluded, as is every non-individual registrant.

Technically, co.uk is separately DNSSEC signed with its own DS record inside the uk zone and a chain of trust that validates to the root. IDN availability is not documented by Nominet, so assume ASCII only.

Who .co.uk suits, and who should avoid it

.co.uk suits essentially any business selling to UK consumers. It is the strongest local-market signal available in the United Kingdom and frequently outperforms a .com for a UK-only audience on trust and click-through. It suits non-UK companies opening a UK operation particularly well, because there is no eligibility barrier and no local entity to incorporate first. And it suits individuals, who get the free WHOIS address opt-out.

Between .co.uk and direct .uk, the honest answer for most British businesses is that .co.uk should be the one you use and .uk the one you also own. .co.uk is what customers expect, type and recognise; .uk is shorter but still reads to many British consumers as a newer alternative. If both are available, take both and redirect one.

Avoid .co.uk if your market is not the UK. On a genuinely global product it suppresses non-UK conversion and invites local jurisdictional expectations you may not want.

Common mistakes with .co.uk

• Registering .co.uk and assuming .uk is safe. It has not been reserved for you since 25 June 2019, and the error has sent established British brands into the aftermarket to buy back their own shorter name.
• Believing .co.uk requires a UK company. It does not, and buyers waste money on nominee registrant services sold on that premise. Those services also put somebody else's name in the registrant field, which is a worse problem than the one they solve.
• Requesting an auth code for a transfer. There is no auth code. You need an IPS tag change, initiated from the registrant email on file at Nominet, and it will not extend your expiry date.
• Leaving the registrant contact as a former agency or developer. Because tag changes must come from the registrant of record, whoever is named there controls whether the domain can move.

Seven to one: why Britain still defaults to .co.uk

When direct .uk launched on 10 June 2014, the reasonable prediction was that the shorter form would gradually displace the longer one as owners upgraded and new businesses skipped the extra label. That has not happened. The most precise dated figure puts the family at 10,508,932 domains in January 2024, of which 9,314,572 were third-level names and 1,374,360 second-level. Ten years in, .co.uk outnumbers direct .uk by roughly seven to one.

Incumbency explains part of it: millions of British businesses were already on .co.uk, with printed material, email addresses and inbound links attached to it, and moving costs more than staying. The rights of registration period, which ran until 06:00 BST on 25 June 2019, explains more, since it gave existing .co.uk holders first claim on the matching .uk and expressly ranked .co.uk ahead of .org.uk. Many exercised that right defensively and carried on using the .co.uk they already had, which inflates the .uk count without changing what anyone visits.

The third reason is recognition, and it is the one that matters commercially. British consumers read .co.uk as a British business the way Americans read .com as a normal website. It is not that .uk looks wrong; it is that .co.uk looks like nothing at all, which is what you want an address to do. For a UK-facing consumer business, that familiarity is worth more than two saved characters.

Behind all of this sits a registry with an unusual relationship to its own users. Nominet's members voted at an Extraordinary General Meeting in March 2021 to remove five directors, including the chief executive and the chair, on a 52.74 per cent vote with a 53.5 per cent turnout, after a campaign about falling public-benefit donations and rising executive pay. It is the most consequential governance revolt in the registry industry's history, and in March 2022 Nominet also suspended registrations from Russian registrars following the invasion of Ukraine.