.tech domain names

What .tech is

.tech is short for technology. IANA classifies it as a generic top-level domain: open, unsponsored, and a product of ICANN's 2012 New gTLD Program. It is aimed at technology companies, startups, technical products and technology media, and restricts nobody else.

The registry operator is Radix Technologies Inc., part of the Radix registry group founded by Bhavin Turakhia, with the IANA delegation record last updated in April 2026. Radix won the string at auction and acquired the winning applicant, Dot Tech LLC, in October 2014. Delegation was in March 2015, the IANA registration date being 12 March, with Wikipedia dating public introduction to 21 March.

One operator-side development matters. On 6 August 2025 Radix announced it had selected Tucows Registry as its back-end registry services provider, moving eleven top-level domains and roughly ten million domains under management, .tech among them, with migration expected that November; completion has not been independently confirmed here. A back-end change is plumbing. It affects EPP endpoints, RDAP hostnames and DNS infrastructure; it does not affect ownership, pricing, or any right a registrant holds.

Worth stating explicitly, because buyers shopping for a technology-flavoured extension often assume otherwise: .tech is not on the HSTS preload list. Plain HTTP works and TLS is optional, as with .com.

Who can register .tech

Anyone, anywhere. There is no requirement to be a technology company, no verification, no documentation and no geographic limitation. Registration is first-come, first-served in real time, and nothing is declared that could later be audited.

Radix's Acceptable Use and Anti-Abuse Policy applies after registration, and it is a use restriction rather than an eligibility gate: it prohibits intellectual property infringement, cybersquatting, spam, phishing, malware distribution and financial scams, with suspension, cancellation or deletion as remedies. You will never be refused a .tech name for being the wrong kind of business, but you can lose one for what you do with it. Standard reservations also remove labels from the pool, including registry-operations names such as www and nic, country and territory names, two-character labels, and Olympic and Red Cross protected identifiers.

What .tech costs to own

.tech has one of the widest first-year-to-renewal gaps of any major new gTLD, and this is the dominant fact about its pricing. Deep first-year discounts are routine at registrar level, and discounted multi-year bundles are sold through deal sites. The standard renewal is substantially higher than any of those entry prices, so budget the renewal and treat the promotion as a one-off saving.

A registry-level price change took effect on 15 January 2026, and Radix has an established pattern of periodic adjustments. Unlike a promotional gap, a registry increase applies to everyone and does not revert, so model a long-held portfolio with an upward drift in renewals. Registering years ahead of an announced increase is the standard hedge.

Premium tiers are large, active and commercially central to Radix, whose own policies state that premium names may carry higher renewal and transfer fees. This is not a one-time acquisition premium: the elevated price applies every year and follows the name to a new registrar. Restoring a lapsed name from redemption likewise costs substantially more than a renewal.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

.tech registers for one to ten years in whole-year increments; that ten-year ceiling is the ICANN gTLD standard offered by registrars rather than something read off a Radix policy document. The lifecycle is standard: an auto-renew grace period after expiry, a thirty-day redemption period in which only the original registrant can restore the name, then pending delete.

Transfers follow standard ICANN gTLD policy with no .tech-specific mechanism: an authorization code, commonly called an EPP or auth code, from the losing registrar. Sixty-day locks apply following initial registration, a prior transfer, and a change of registrant, and a successful transfer adds one year. Registrar and registry locks are both available.

The .tech-specific point to watch is premium status. A premium name carries its tier through a transfer, because the tier is set at the registry: the gaining registrar bills the premium renewal rate, not the standard one.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

.tech is a gTLD, so RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, has been the definitive source of its registration data since ICANN's WHOIS sunset on 28 January 2025. Radix's own documentation still describes port-43 access, but that text may predate both the RDAP transition and the 2025 back-end migration, so the live endpoints are worth checking.

Public output is redacted under ICANN's Registration Data Policy. Privacy and proxy services are permitted and are offered by registrars in the ordinary way, frequently bundled. UDRP and URS both apply.

DNSSEC is supported, with a signed zone and registrant-managed DS records; Radix's policy pages historically pointed to CentralNic's practice statement, a reference that should be expected to move after the 2025 migration. Internationalized domain names are supported, a genuine differentiator against ASCII-only extensions such as .app and .dev: Radix added IDN support in 2016, covering Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Thai and Lao. Confirm current language tables before committing.

Who .tech suits, and who should avoid it

.tech suits technology startups and scale-ups, SaaS and hardware companies, AI and robotics ventures, developer and IT service businesses, technology conferences and media, and technical education providers. It works best where the brand name is the whole domain and the extension completes the phrase. Radix reports adopters including 1X Technologies at 1x.tech and IQM Quantum Computers, which migrated from a longer .com to iqm.tech.

Avoid it if you are not a technology business, because tech is a strong semantic claim that reads as opportunistic outside the category. Avoid it if you are buying on a deep first-year promotion without having priced the standard renewal, and avoid a premium .tech unless you have modelled the recurring premium across your holding period. In enterprise procurement and financial services, .com remains the default expectation.

Common mistakes with .tech

The recurring .tech mistakes are commercial rather than technical, as you would expect from an extension with no unusual technical requirements.

• Buying on a first-year promotion, or a discounted bundle from a deal site, without checking the standard renewal. .tech has one of the widest promotional-to-renewal gaps of any major new gTLD, and the January 2026 registry increase widened it further. Portfolio buyers are hit hardest, the shock arriving on every name at once.
• Assuming a premium .tech is premium only at purchase. Radix premium tiers apply to renewal and transfer as well as registration, and follow the name to a new registrar. A premium acquired as a bargain can become the most expensive line in a portfolio.
• Assuming .tech carries an HTTPS mandate like .app and .dev. It does not, and the inverse matters too: some buyers choose .tech expecting built-in security signalling at the TLD level and get none.

What a purely descriptive extension is actually worth

.tech is the cleanest test case in the 2012 round for a specific bet: that a plain descriptive English word, sold to anyone, can sustain a real business. There is no brand behind the string, no community, no credential and no geography; the extension does nothing except say what the site is about. Six applicants thought that worth competing for, including Google's Charleston Road Registry, Donuts, Uniregistry and Dot Tech LLC. The set went to an ICANN auction of last resort on 17 September 2014, where the winning price is widely reported at approximately $6.76 million, ICANNWiki giving $6,760,000. Because it was an ICANN auction, the proceeds went to ICANN rather than to the losing applicants. Radix, a comparatively small independent registry, beat Google for the string, then acquired Dot Tech LLC weeks later.

That model dictates how the extension is priced. A purely descriptive extension has little pricing power at acquisition, because a buyer choosing between technology-flavoured extensions has a dozen alternatives and no switching cost. So .tech is promoted like a commodity: deep first-year discounts, deal-site bundles, student giveaways. Once the name is in use, the switching cost inverts. Moving a live site off a domain costs traffic, links and email continuity, which is why a renewal far above the promotional entry price still gets paid. The business is in the renewal, not the sale. Layered on top is a premium programme where the elevated tier recurs annually and follows the name through transfers, which is how a descriptive extension keeps earning from its best strings instead of selling them once.

Whether the model works is the interesting question, and Radix publishes enough for a partial answer. In the first half of 2026 the group recorded a record 4,424 new premium registrations, up from 4,268 in the second half of 2025, and .tech led every Radix extension with 1,229 premium registrations in the half. More telling than the volume is the retention curve: Radix reports premium renewal rates of 51 per cent at first renewal, 73 per cent at second and 84 per cent at third. Roughly half of premium buyers walk away after a year; the half that stay are overwhelmingly still there three years later. That is what a descriptive extension should look like if the model holds: high churn among speculative registrations, strong stickiness among names that ended up on a working business.