.com.au domain names

What .com.au is

The .com.au namespace belongs to Australia and is not a top-level domain in its own right. IANA delegates au; .au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA) defines com.au beneath it, so yourname.com.au is a third-level registration governed by auDA's licensing rules rather than ICANN consensus policy.

.au was created on 5 March 1986, when Jon Postel allocated it to Kevin Robert Elz at the University of Melbourne. auDA, a self-regulatory membership body with more than 6,583 members, obtained ICANN's assent in 2001 and opened the competitive registrar regime on 1 July 2002. It sets policy but does not run the servers: Afilias won the backend tender in December 2017, and auDA's reports now name Identity Digital Australia as operator.

Two dates then reshaped the namespace: 12 April 2021, when new Licensing Rules commenced, and 24 March 2022, when direct .au opened alongside com.au. The most precise dated registration total available is 4,138,919 as at 10 December 2022. One piece of vocabulary is load-bearing: auDA issues licences, not registrations. You do not own a .com.au; you hold a licence conditional on continuing to qualify.

Who can register .com.au

Two independent eligibility tests apply, and a registrant must pass both. Buyers routinely conflate them. The first asks who you are; the second asks whether the string you want relates to you.

Test one is Australian Presence: one of roughly eighteen categories in the .au Domain Administration Rules: Licensing, including Australian citizens and permanent residents, companies registered under the Corporations Act 2001, foreign companies holding an ARBN, incorporated associations, ABN holders, Indigenous corporations, registered charities, trusts with Australian trustees, government bodies, and holders of an Australian trade mark.

Test two is that the domain name itself must relate to the registrant. For com.au the applicant must be a Commercial Entity and the name must be one of:

• a match to the applicant's company, business, statutory or personal name;
• an acronym or abbreviation of one of those names;
• a match to an Australian trade mark held by the applicant, subject to the exact match rule;
• a match or acronym of a related body corporate, partnership or trust; or
• a match or synonym of services the applicant provides, goods it sells, events it sponsors, activities it facilitates, or premises it operates.

That final limb is the close and substantial connection test, and it is the one people misread. It does not mean a name that suits your branding; it is anchored to something the registrant demonstrably does. A plumbing company can hold emergencyplumbing.com.au because it provides emergency plumbing. It cannot hold cheapflights.com.au, because it does not sell flights.

The 2021 rules narrowed the trade mark route. Where a mark is the basis of eligibility the domain must be an Exact Match — all the words of the mark in order, excluding DNS identifiers, punctuation, articles and ampersands. auDA's example: a mark for The Little Red Wagon Bookshop supports thelittleredwagonbookshop.com.au but not lrwb.com.au. Any licence created, transferred or renewed on or after 12 April 2021 falls under the new rules, and that renewal trigger catches holders who assumed they were grandfathered.

Leasing a com.au name to an unrelated third party is prohibited, retrospectively. Enforcement runs from a registrar complaint with a 30-day window, to auDA, to the Licence Review Panel, and the remedy is cancellation, never transfer — the name returns to availability rather than passing to the complainant. auDA's Licensing Rules Review reports mid-2026, so treat these rules as current rather than settled.

What .com.au costs to own

auDA sets a wholesale fee per licence-year and registrars set retail. The structure is flat: no promotional first-year registry pricing, no premium tier, and .au direct priced in line with com.au. A large gap between an advertised first-year price and the renewal is registrar margin, not registry policy.

The five-year maximum term is itself a constraint, since there is no ten-year prepay to lock in cost. No auDA wholesale price change has been verified for 2024 to 2026; the likelier source of change is policy, since the Licensing Rules Review has canvassed limits on how many names one presence-holder may register.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

Licence periods are 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 years. The five-year ceiling is unusually short; most country codes allow ten.

Transfers use an authorisation code, but auDA prescribes the code itself: 13 to 32 characters, at least one letter and one digit, no dictionary words. The registrant submits a written transfer request with the code to the gaining registrar, which must obtain written agreement from the registrant contact recorded in the registry database before proceeding; the losing registrar may send an audit message. The transfer must be effected within two calendar days of that confirmation.

A licence under dispute or court proceedings cannot transfer, nor can an expired licence outside the 30-day renewal grace period. auDA's rules contain no explicit 60-day post-registration lock, and whether a transfer extends the licence term is not confirmed — do not assume the gTLD convention of an added year.

The mechanism that catches aftermarket buyers is different. Because a .com.au is a licence tied to a qualifying entity, moving it to a new owner is a change of registrant, and the incoming registrant must independently satisfy both eligibility tests for that string. A sale can be blocked outright when the buyer's entity has no connection to the name.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

Publication is governed by the auDA WHOIS Policy 2025-11, effective 4 February 2026. The driver is Australian data protection law rather than GDPR, but the outcome is the same kind of split: identity is published, contactability is not.

Published across web WHOIS, port 43 and RDAP: the registrant's legal name and ACN or ABN, the eligibility type and its associated name or ID, the registrant contact name, the technical contact name and ID, plus nameservers, DNSSEC status and registrar. Not published: registrant street address, telephone and fax, withheld to comply with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). All email addresses have been removed from port 43 WHOIS and RDAP.

There is no privacy or proxy product, and none is possible. Whether the holder is a sole trader or a listed company, the legal name and business identifier are public, because the public identity of the licence holder is part of how eligibility is policed. You cannot conceal that your business holds a name — but nobody can cold-call or doorstep you from the record either.

WHOIS runs at whois.auda.org.au and RDAP at rdap.cctld.au. DNSSEC is signed at both levels, with au carrying DS records in the root and com.au separately signed in au. Internationalised domain names are not verified as available; assume ASCII only.

Who .com.au suits, and who should avoid it

.com.au suits Australian companies, ABN holders, sole traders and organisations trading in Australia. It is the default commercial extension in that market and carries a trust premium .com does not, precisely because it is gated. The gating is the product.

Avoid it if you have no Australian presence and no registered Australian trade mark; if you hold a mark but want a name that is not its exact match; if you want to hold a generic name as an investment or park it, because name-to-registrant matching and the leasing prohibition make that structurally difficult by design; or if your brand protection depends on ten-year terms.

Common mistakes with .com.au

• Buying a name with no connection to your entity. Eligibility is not simply a question of being Australian. The string itself must match your entity or mark, or fall within the close and substantial connection limb. This is the most common cause of a cancelled .com.au, and the aftermarket is full of names a given buyer legally cannot hold.
• Relying on a pre-2021 trade mark strategy. Foreign brand owners who registered several names off one Australian mark are now caught by the Exact Match rule, and the trigger includes renewal.
• Leasing the domain to a client. Prohibited since 2021, related entities excepted, and it applies retrospectively. Agencies that hold client domains and licence them back should review those arrangements.
• Assuming a ten-year registration is possible. Five years is the maximum licence period.

The direct .au launch, and the names nobody could claim

On 24 March 2022 Australia opened direct second-level registration: yourname.au, alongside yourname.com.au. Anyone with a validated Australian presence can register one, with no ABN or ACN required and none of the category restrictions com.au imposes.

Existing licence holders were given a Priority Allocation Period of 180 days, from 24 March to 20 September 2022, to claim the matching direct name. Priority Category 1 covered holders whose licence was created on or before 4 February 2018; Priority Category 2 covered those created after that cut-off but before 24 March 2022. Category 1 beat Category 2 outright, and among competing Category 2 applicants the earliest creation date won.

The interesting part is what happened when two Category 1 holders wanted the same string — the holder of brand.com.au and the holder of brand.net.au, say. auDA declined to adjudicate. The rules require the applicants to negotiate which of them will be the Designated Person, and state plainly that resolution of competing claims between persons is solely a matter between those persons.

That produced a category of permanently stuck names. Where Category 1 applicants could not agree, the name sits on priority hold, with the competing applicants paying annual fees to keep their claims alive and nobody able to use it. Names with no priority application went to general availability after 20 September 2022. auDA has published no count of names still in contention, but contested direct .au names are an explicit agenda item in the 2025 to 2026 Licensing Rules Review — the clearest evidence available that negotiate-it-yourselves did not fully resolve. So if you take brand.com.au now, brand.au may belong to someone else, may be frozen in contention, or may be freely available. Check both before you commit.