.eu domain names

What .eu is

.eu is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the European Union. It is unusual in that category: it maps to no ISO 3166-1 country and is governed by EU law rather than by a national administration. Two script variants exist as separately delegated TLDs, .ею in Cyrillic and .ευ in Greek. The registry is EURid vzw, a Belgian non-profit founded in April 2003 by DNS Belgium, IIT-CNR of Italy and IIS of Sweden.

EURid does not own .eu. It runs it under a service concession from the European Commission, periodically re-competed; the current designation took effect on 27 October 2021 under Implementing Decision (EU) 2021/1878, for an initial five years extendable once. .eu entered the IANA database on 28 April 2005 and reached general availability on 7 April 2006, taking more than 700,000 registrations in the first four hours. It now holds 3,812,187 domains at an average renewal rate of 82.5%, above the legacy generic-TLD average, with Germany, the Netherlands and France the largest registrant countries.

Who can register .eu

Eligibility is set by Article 3 of Regulation (EU) 2019/517, applying in full since 13 October 2022. A .eu may be held by a Union citizen independently of their place of residence; by a non-citizen resident in a Member State; by an undertaking established in the Union; or by an organisation established in the Union. Eligibility was extended to the European Economic Area - Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway - in 2014. The citizenship limb is recent: until 19 October 2019, eligibility was tied to residence or establishment.

The rules are enforced continuously, not once at the point of sale. Under EURid's Registration Data Verification Policy, messages from [email protected] or [email protected] require the holder to validate their data by a deadline stated in the message. Failure means suspension, and suspension compounds: any new domain you register or receive is suspended automatically, and a suspended domain cannot be transferred away. Article 4 permits revocation for unpaid debts, failure to meet the Article 3 criteria, or breach of the registration requirements, while Article 4(5) requires a reasonable opportunity to rectify first.

Contrary to a widely repeated claim, EURid does not prohibit trustee arrangements, and registrars sell them openly. They work because the trustee, an EU-established undertaking, becomes the registrant of record and so satisfies Article 3; EURid polices the accuracy of the record, not the ownership behind it. State the consequence plainly before buying one: the trustee is the legal holder, and the client has no claim the registry will recognise.

What .eu costs to own

EURid does not set retail prices - accredited registrars set their own. What the registry sets is a flat wholesale fee per domain-year, with no variation by name.

The structural consequences favour buyers. There is no premium tier: no registry premium list, no surcharge for short or generic strings, no registry auctions. That is a legal outcome rather than a commercial choice, since Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/857 requires competitive pricing and directs annual surpluses to the Union budget. A registry barred from accumulating profit has no incentive to reprice popular names. No registry price change has been announced for 2025 or 2026, and the six-months-notice and ten-year price-lock mechanics familiar from generic TLDs do not apply, because .eu sits outside ICANN's contractual framework. Paid registry services are limited to a Registrar Lock and a Registry Lock, the latter overriding the former.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

Registration periods run from one year to ten, with renewal in the same range and auto-renewal in consecutive one-year periods. A domain registered on 29 February expires on 28 February.

Transfers use an authorisation code, but the design gives the registrant more leverage than almost any other extension. There are three routes to the code: ask your registrar, issue it yourself from your My .eu account, or obtain it from EURid directly through an emergency link on the WHOIS result page plus a signed form. Codes issued by different routes coexist, each valid for 40 days or until one is used. Because the holder can self-issue, the losing registrar cannot block a transfer, and registrar-level transfer locks are not available at all. A completed transfer adds one year.

A transfer and a trade are different operations. A transfer changes the registrar; a trade changes the holder, by email confirmation from both parties, and does not change the expiry date. After deletion a name sits in quarantine for 40 days rather than entering a redemption period with a punitive restore charge; website and email stop immediately, but the domain can be reactivated at any point in that window, through the existing registrar or by transferring to a new registrar who will reactivate it.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

EURid runs a data-minimised WHOIS split by registrant type, and the split runs opposite to generic-TLD habits. For a natural person the record shows the email address and language preference and nothing else. For a legal entity it shows company name, city, region, country, email address and language. Neither has a street address or telephone number published, and the contact point is a working email address rather than a web form. Individuals therefore get automatic privacy that most gTLDs charge for, while companies are more exposed on .eu than on a .com.

Privacy and proxy services are neither offered nor prohibited by the registry, whose stated position is that they are largely unnecessary given how little is published. What is mandatory is accuracy: data must be complete and accurate at all times, and a domain may be revoked if the registrant's email address is not functioning. Third parties needing more go through the Registration Data Disclosure Policy, asserting a legitimate interest on a form that EURid assesses individually.

There is no discoverable RDAP service. The IANA bootstrap file published on 23 July 2026 lists no entry for .eu or either script variant, and rdap.eurid.eu does not resolve, so tooling that assumes RDAP will fail. The zone is DNSSEC-signed, from around the middle of 2010, with 775,866 domains - 20.47% of the zone - signed at the end of 2025. Internationalised names work in Latin, Cyrillic and Greek under two strict rules: every character in a label must come from one script, and the script must match the TLD.

Who .eu suits, and who should avoid it

.eu suits businesses trading across several member states. It is the only extension that reads as pan-European rather than national, which makes it the natural choice for a company selling into Germany, France, Poland and Spain that does not want to look German, French, Polish or Spanish. It also suits EU citizens living outside the Union, who qualify on citizenship alone, and registrants who value mobility, since self-issued codes make .eu one of the hardest extensions anywhere for a registrar to hold hostage.

It is a poor choice for anyone whose eligibility could lapse - a subsidiary that might be wound up, a residence permit that might not be renewed. UK-established businesses without an EU entity are not eligible at all. Teams building tooling that depends on RDAP should look elsewhere, as should companies that need their identity off the public record. Domain investors get the worst of it: no premium tier, no registry auctions, a buyer pool restricted by law, and eligibility risk on every resale.

Common mistakes with .eu

Treating registry verification email as spam. This is the mistake that cost hundreds of thousands of registrants their domains. Ignoring a verification deadline triggers suspension, which then applies automatically to every new .eu you register or receive and blocks you from transferring away. Registration data can only be corrected through your registrar, so a stale registrar relationship turns a fixable problem into a lost name.

Assuming eligibility is tested once, at registration. It is tested continuously. Registrants who were entirely compliant in 2016 lost their domains in 2022 because their country's status changed, not because their conduct did. The structural fix is to hold .eu through an entity whose EU establishment is durable.

Confusing the trade with the transfer. A transfer adds a year and a trade does not, so a buyer completing a trade near expiry can acquire a name with days left on it. And because a transfer moves the registrar while leaving the holder unchanged, a buyer who only transfers has bought nothing - the seller remains the legal registrant.

Brexit and the 317,000: what happens when a country stops qualifying

The .eu eligibility rule is a relationship test. The registrant must be resident in, or established in, the European Union, the EEA or a qualifying state, or must hold Union citizenship. When the United Kingdom left the European Union, registrants whose eligibility rested solely on a UK connection ceased to satisfy that test. Nothing about their conduct changed; the ground beneath the registration moved.

The sequence is documented by EURid, the European Commission and the UK government, and the dates are firm. The Commission published its notice to stakeholders on 29 March 2018, warning that UK-established undertakings and organisations, and non-EU citizens resident in the UK, would cease to be eligible on withdrawal. EURid published its own notice on 19 July 2019, the amended eligibility rules took effect on 19 October 2019, and EURid began contacting affected registrants directly in October 2020. On 1 January 2021 approximately 317,000 UK-held domains were suspended: websites and email stopped working, while the names remained in the register. On 1 July 2021 the unremedied names were withdrawn - no longer registered, but not yet available. On 1 January 2022 they were revoked and released for re-registration by anyone, first-come first-served, with no preference for the former holders.

Two details are routinely got wrong. The domains were not cancelled in one step; the three-stage lifecycle gave a full year of warning after suspension, and remediation was possible throughout. And not everyone in the UK lost eligibility: UK-established undertakings and organisations did, but EU citizens resident in the UK did not, because the citizenship limb of Regulation 2019/517 was written precisely to protect them, entering force more than a year before the withdrawal date. UK government guidance confirms they may keep their domains, though registrars may ask for proof.

Affected registrants had real routes to keep a name. The principal one was a trade: changing the registrant of record to a party that did satisfy Article 3 - an EU or EEA-established company, a subsidiary, or an eligible individual - and this remained available during suspension and during withdrawal, not merely before the deadline. A second route applied to EU nationals in the UK, who had only to evidence their citizenship. A third, where no eligible party was available, was a trustee arrangement, with the caveat that the trustee becomes the legal holder. What no route could rescue was a registrant who never read the notices; the loss was almost always a failure of correspondence rather than a shortage of options.

The general lesson deserves stating without moralising. A country-code or regional extension is granted on the basis of a relationship - to a country, a union, a residence, a place of establishment - and relationships can end. Political status changes, companies are wound up, permits lapse, borders are redrawn. A generic extension asks nothing of you and can therefore take nothing away for reasons outside your control; a restricted one asks something of you continuously, and audits the answer. That is not a reason to avoid .eu. It is a reason to hold it through a party that will still qualify in ten years, and to treat registry correspondence about eligibility and data accuracy as legal correspondence rather than marketing.