.de domain names

What .de is

.de is the country-code top-level domain for Germany. Registrations are taken directly at the second level, with no official second-level categories.

The registry is DENIC eG, in Frankfurt am Main. The eG is load-bearing: eingetragene Genossenschaft, a registered cooperative under German cooperative law, with roughly 300 member companies — ISPs and registrars including Deutsche Telekom, United Internet and Vodafone Deutschland — who are simultaneously its owners and its principal customers. DENIC works on a not-for-profit basis and runs its own registry backend and DNS infrastructure in-house.

.de was delegated on 5 November 1986, in the same wave as .us, .uk and .au. The first six domains appeared in March 1988 under Rudiger Volk at the University of Dortmund; administration moved to the University of Karlsruhe in 1994, then to a consortium of German ISPs, and DENIC eG was founded in December 1996 with the operational handover completed on 1 January 1999.

On scale, hedge deliberately. DENIC's live counter showed 18,050,064 domains in July 2026, with dated corroboration of 17,639,014 at 31 March 2025. Rankings are less firm: DENIC claims only to be one of the world's largest country codes, while other sources place .de second globally behind .cn. The defensible statement is that .de is consistently either the largest or second-largest country code in the world, generally ranked second behind .cn as of 2026, and comfortably the largest in Europe.

Who can register .de

.de is one of the world's most open major country codes. DENIC states that .de domains are available to everyone, with a single stipulation: you must have legal capacity and full legal competence. There is no nationality requirement, no residency requirement, and no standing requirement to nominate a German contact at registration.

That last point is the most commonly out-of-date fact published about .de. The historic rule required an administrative contact, the Admin-C, resident in Germany and acting as the holder's authorised representative. DENIC's own FAQ states that since GDPR took effect in May 2018, DENIC no longer records an administrative contact for reasons of data economy. The role was abolished, and any source still asserting a German-resident Admin-C requirement has been wrong for eight years.

What replaced it is a reactive obligation. DENIC's Domain Terms at section 3(4) require a holder not domiciled in Germany to name, within two weeks of a corresponding request by DENIC, an authorised representative domiciled in Germany for receiving service of official or court documents. The obligation crystallises only when DENIC asks, and DENIC asks only when triggered, typically by a third party asserting a name or trade mark right against a foreign-domiciled holder. A post office box is insufficient; a full street address is required.

So a registrant in the United States, India or Australia can register a .de today with a purely foreign address and no German contact, and nothing further will be asked unless a German rights-holder invokes the mechanism — at which point they have two weeks to comply. The local presence and Admin-C services many registrars still sell for .de are therefore largely legacy products addressing a rule withdrawn in 2018. Their residual value is narrow: they pre-position a German address so a request can be answered inside the window rather than in a panic.

What DENIC does enforce is data accuracy — natural persons identified by given name and surname, entities by full company name including legal form, with a street address rather than a PO box. Incorrect data entitles DENIC to terminate the domain contract without notice.

What .de costs to own

DENIC charges its roughly 300 members from a published annual price schedule; members and their resellers set retail independently. Because DENIC is a not-for-profit cooperative owned by those same members, wholesale pricing is set to cover cost.

There is no registration versus renewal differential at registry level — the price list does not distinguish an initial registration from continuing administration, so any first-year discount is purely the retailer's marketing and the renewal price is the real price. There is also no premium tier: all .de domains, including one- and two-character names and pure numerals, are priced identically and allocated first come, first served, and high prices for short .de names occur only on the aftermarket. Ancillary paid services exist — DENICdirect, AuthInfo2 issuance, DISPUTE entries, TRANSIT and .de Registry Lock — but these are operational products, not name-based tiers. No registry price change has been announced or verified. Because .de has no registration term there is no expiry-and-restore cycle to budget for; what exists is a roughly 30-day recovery window after deletion.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

.de has no registration term in the gTLD sense: no one-to-ten-year selection, no expiry date, no maximum. DENIC's Domain Terms section 7(1) states that the domain contract is concluded for an indefinite period and may be terminated by the holder at any time without prior notice. DENIC may terminate only on substantial grounds — illegal content, court judgments, persistent breach, inaccurate data, non-payment. The catch is that the registrar's contract is a different thing: registrars bill in annual or monthly cycles with their own minimum terms and cancellation notice periods, and that is the deadline that will actually cost you something.

Transfers use DENIC's own mechanism, and it is not an EPP auth code in the gTLD sense. The vocabulary is specific: KK stands for Konnektivitatskoordination, connectivity coordination, and a transfer request was historically a KK-Antrag; CHPROV, for change provider, is the technical operation name at DENIC. Under that old model the gaining provider lodged a request and the losing provider answered ACK, NACK or LATEACK, with silence defaulting to rejection. AuthInfo arrived on 9 December 2008 and the paper, asynchronous KK-Antrag was abolished on 1 February 2010, so anyone telling you a .de transfer needs the losing provider's agreement is describing a process that ended sixteen years ago.

The current process has two paths. Under AuthInfo1, the holder instructs their current provider to generate an AuthInfo, which the provider transmits encrypted to DENIC and to the holder. Under AuthInfo2, the escape hatch, a holder whose provider is uncooperative or defunct asks the new provider to request an AuthInfo directly from DENIC, and DENIC generates the code itself and posts it to the registered holder by registered mail. Any DENIC member can request AuthInfo2, for a fee. The code expires automatically after 30 days and must then be requested again, unlike gTLD auth codes that often persist until changed. Once the gaining provider submits the request with a valid code the transfer executes immediately, without the losing provider's confirmation, because only the holder possesses it. Provider change and holder change can be done in a single step.

One thing blocks a transfer outright: a DISPUTE entry, which DENIC may place where a third party submits evidence of a right possibly infringed by the domain. It lasts one year, is extendable, and positions its holder to take the name over if the registration lapses.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

.de was among the registries most affected by GDPR, and the outcome is the opposite of what most people assume. The widely repeated claim that .de WHOIS shows no registrant data at all was true immediately after 2018 and is no longer accurate. DENIC now runs a two-tier model split by holder type.

For legal entities, holder name and address are published, along with email and telephone. For natural persons, none of that is published. Registration date, status, nameservers, DNS key data and the abuse contacts are published for everyone. So an individual registering a .de gets free, automatic redaction better than most generic extensions offer, while a company gets less privacy than it would on a .com. The shift toward publishing legal-entity data is consistent with NIS2-driven obligations on registries, though the precise instrument and effective date of the 2026 German transparency changes are not settled in published sources.

DENIC offers no privacy or proxy product, and does not need one for individuals, whose data is already withheld at no cost. For legal entities publication is by design and nothing can be bought that changes it. No DENIC clause bans proxy services by name, but combined with the accuracy obligation and the termination right they are best described as not offered and effectively incompatible rather than expressly prohibited. Third-party disclosure of withheld data is available in exactly four categories: trade mark and name-rights holders, public authorities, civil creditors holding an enforceable judgment, and insolvency administrators. There is no reverse lookup by person.

Access runs through port 43 at whois.denic.de, webwhois.denic.de, and RDAP at rdap.denic.de, which DENIC describes as pilot operation with no guaranteed service levels. DNSSEC has been in production since early 2010. IDN support covers 93 additional characters beyond ASCII — the German umlauts, the eszett and accented letters from other European languages — under IDNA2008 in nontransitional mode.

Who .de suits, and who should avoid it

.de suits any business trading in or targeting Germany, with its strong documented domestic preference for .de over .com. It suits non-German companies wanting a German presence, because the namespace is genuinely open with no local-presence gate. It suits individuals and sole traders who value privacy, since natural persons are withheld from WHOIS by default at no cost. And it suits anyone wanting a very short name, because one- and two-character domains are permitted and priced identically.

Avoid it if you are a company that needs its identity off public WHOIS — the single biggest reason to hesitate, because legal entities have name and address published with no privacy service available. Avoid it if you could not nominate a German-domiciled agent for service within two weeks should DENIC ask, which realistically means anyone at meaningful risk of a German trade mark challenge. Avoid it if you want a global-first brand domain, or if you expect the UDRP, which does not apply — disputes go to German courts. And avoid it if your strategy depends on prepaying ten years, or on registry-supported premium and aftermarket infrastructure.

Common mistakes with .de

• Buying a German Admin-C or local presence service you do not need. The requirement was abolished in May 2018, yet registrar pages and comparison sites still assert it. Registrants either overpay for trustee services or wrongly conclude .de is closed to them. The real obligation only bites when DENIC asks, and then gives two weeks.
• Registering as a company and not realising your name and address go public. Corporate registrants assume .de WHOIS is fully redacted. It is not for legal entities, and there is no privacy service to buy. The mirror-image error is equally common: writing .de off as unusable for privacy-conscious individuals, when natural persons get free default redaction.
• Registering an eszett domain and assuming it captures the ss variant. Under IDNA2003 the eszett was mapped to ss and the two forms were one domain. Under IDNA2008, which DENIC follows, they are two entirely separate domains, yet some legacy systems still perform the old conversion and traffic silently splits. DENIC advises registering both.
• Diarising a renewal date that does not exist. There is no registry expiry — only your registrar's billing cycle and its cancellation notice period.

The registry its own customers own

Almost every registry of comparable size is a commercial business. DENIC is not. It is an eingetragene Genossenschaft, a registered cooperative under German cooperative law, with roughly 300 members who are simultaneously its owners and its customers, operating expressly on a not-for-profit basis. The membership is the German internet industry itself: Deutsche Telekom, United Internet and Vodafone Deutschland sit alongside far smaller ISPs and registrars, each with a voice in the Members' Meeting that appoints the Executive and Supervisory Boards. The structure was chosen deliberately in December 1996, to give .de a long-term reliable legal framework distinct from a commercial registry.

The consequences show up in the rulebook rather than the marketing. A commercial registry has an interest in scarcity: it can create premium tiers, price short names higher, split registration from renewal, and build aftermarket infrastructure to capture resale value. DENIC does none of these. When a registry is owned by the people who buy from it, extracting margin from them is self-defeating.

The clearest illustration came from litigation. DENIC long enforced a three-character minimum length, which meant vw.de could not be registered. Volkswagen sued, and in April 2008 the Regional Court of Frankfurt ruled that DENIC must permit two-character domains despite its own policy. DENIC then went further than the judgment required and opened one- and two-character and pure-numeral domains to all applicants on 23 October 2009 — a land rush that put vw.de, v.de and 123.de into circulation. A commercial registry releasing that inventory would have auctioned it; DENIC allocated it first come, first served at the standard price.

The trade-off is real. Registrants who want a registry that will intervene, arbitrate and sell services around their names will find .de sparse — the German Federal Court of Justice rejected a 2004 claim seeking to make DENIC block domains proactively, establishing that it has no general duty to police registrations. What they get instead is an extension whose economics have not changed shape in three decades, run by an organisation with no shareholder to satisfy.