.uk domain names

What .uk is

.uk is the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It carries a well-known anomaly: the UK's ISO 3166-1 code is GB, not UK. The British academic network had standardised on uk before RFC 920 designated GB in October 1984 and declined to move. .gb was reserved, never meaningfully used, and can no longer be registered.

This page covers direct second-level registration, the yourname.uk form, which has only existed since 2014 and sits alongside the older third-level namespaces .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk and the restricted ones. The extension was delegated on 24 July 1985 by Jon Postel to Andrew McDowell at University College London, the first country-code delegation Postel ever made. Registrations were screened by hand by a committee of ISPs until Nominet UK was incorporated on 14 May 1996 and replaced that committee with a first-come, first-served registry. Nominet still runs it: a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee whose membership of ISPs and registrars elects non-executive directors.

The significant current development is a platform migration. A replacement policy set dated 2026-03 has been published for registrars, covering registration, registrant terms, inter-registrar transfers, proxy services, lifecycle and data quality. Nominet's public policy page states that the policies underpinning .UK change on 9 February 2027; the registrar-facing page says they take effect at the point of transition to the new platform, with the date to be announced after a formal notice period.

Who can register .uk

There is no eligibility requirement for .uk. None. No UK residence, no UK company, no local presence, no nexus declaration, no documentation. Registration is first come, first served and open to any person or entity anywhere in the world.

The restrictions in the .uk family sit in the other third-level namespaces, and buyers occasionally trip over them:

• .co.uk and .org.uk - no restriction in practice, whatever the commercial and non-commercial intent behind the labels.
• .me.uk - the registrant must be a natural person.
• .ltd.uk and .plc.uk - UK private and public limited companies only, and the domain must match the name registered at Companies House. These two really are checked.
• .net.uk - ISPs and network operators only.
• .sch.uk - schools, at the fourth level beneath a local authority name.
• .ac.uk, .gov.uk, .nhs.uk, .police.uk and .mod.uk - closed institutional namespaces. Names such as .bl.uk, .parliament.uk and .royal.uk are reserved to named institutions.

The one obligation attaching to every .uk registrant is accurate registrant data. Nominet's Data Quality Policy requires it, and a materially false name or address is a breach that can cost you the domain. It is the only entry condition Nominet polices.

What .uk costs to own

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

The structure that does matter is two-tier. Nominet members pay the per-annum wholesale rate for any term from one to ten years, while non-members pay a substantially higher fixed rate for a two-year block. This is how Nominet pushes registrars into membership, and it is why buying through a non-member reseller is structurally more expensive than it needs to be.

Registry price changes have been rare and small: the last was announced on 1 October 2019 and took effect on 13 January 2020, and the fee schedule page, last updated 9 April 2026, records no later change. Retail behaviour looks nothing like wholesale, with heavy first-year discounting followed by renewals several times higher, and because the wholesale fee is flat and low that entire gap is registrar margin.

Registration terms, renewals, and transfers

Terms run from one year to ten, and the new 2026-03 registrant terms restate that a domain may be registered for between one and ten years. That does not change at platform transition.

Transfers do. A .uk domain does not transfer with an EPP authorization code. It transfers by changing its IPS tag. An IPS tag is a short identifier held at the registry recording which registrar a domain currently sits with, written as strings such as NAME-COM, GODADDY or TUCOWS-UK. It is a property of the domain in Nominet's database, not a secret issued to the registrant, so there is nothing to paste into a gaining registrar's transfer form, and no such code exists yet.

A transfer proceeds in three steps. First, the registrant asks the losing registrar to change the domain's IPS tag to the gaining registrar's tag, or makes the change directly through Nominet's own online service if they hold Nominet account access. Second, the tag change takes effect at the registry instantly; the domain now sits on the new registrar's tag but is not yet inside anyone's customer account. Third, the registrant tells the gaining registrar the domain is on their tag, and the gaining registrar picks it up into the account.

Several consequences catch people out. There is no five-day approval clock and no confirmation email chain of the kind gTLD transfers use. The tag change does not add a year: it is normally free and includes no renewal, so the expiry date is unchanged. The request must come from the registrant contact of record at Nominet, not from whoever holds the registrar account login. And because the change is instant and one-directional, a domain can sit on a registrar's tag unclaimed until the third step is completed.

The announced successor is conventional. The .UK Inter-registrar Transfer Policy dated 2026-03 replaces tags with a Transfer Authorisation Code: the losing registrar must remove transfer locks and supply the code within five days at no charge, the registry validates the code and completes the transfer immediately, and the transfer may be taken with or without a renewal of one to ten years. Nominet's policy page gives 9 February 2027; the registrar page says the date will be announced. Until then, IPS tags are the live mechanism.

WHOIS, RDAP, and privacy

Nominet publishes WHOIS at whois.nic.uk and, unusually for this group of country codes, a documented RDAP service at rdap.nominet.uk.

Privacy services are permitted, but on Nominet's terms rather than as an anonymity product. Since the 2015 reform a registrar may hold the registrant's true details without publishing them, showing its own contact information instead, and in exchange must act as address for service and handle abuse complaints. A .UK Proxy Policy dated 2026-03 sits in the forthcoming policy set.

The distinctive .uk feature is the individual opt-out. Since 1 September 2015 a registrant who is an individual, and whose domain is not used for business, may opt their address out of WHOIS publication at no cost. The test is that the domain must not transact with customers and must not primarily advertise or promote goods, services or facilities, and Nominet deliberately widened it so that small bloggers running affiliate links or pay-per-click advertising still qualify. Nobody else can opt out: anyone trading through the domain is excluded, as is every non-individual registrant, and ticking the box on a domain you sell through is a breach of the terms rather than a display preference.

.uk is DNSSEC signed at both levels, with a DS record for uk in the root and a separate DS for co.uk within the uk zone. IDN availability is undocumented by Nominet, so assume ASCII only.

Who .uk suits, and who should avoid it

Direct .uk suits any business trading in the United Kingdom that wants the shortest local form, brands that already hold the matching .co.uk, and international companies wanting a clear UK market signal without an eligibility process. It suits individuals better than most extensions in this group, because the free WHOIS address opt-out is a genuine advantage that .us does not offer at any price.

Avoid it if your audience has no UK connection, because a UK country code on a US-only or global business reads as a mistake. And be realistic if the exact-match .uk you want was claimed during the 2014 to 2019 rights window: that is now a resale negotiation, not a registration.

Common mistakes with .uk

• Assuming .co.uk and .uk come as a pair. They have not since 06:00 BST on 25 June 2019. If you register brand.co.uk today, brand.uk may already belong to somebody else.
• Asking the registrar for the EPP code. There is not one yet. You need an IPS tag change, requested from the registrant email on file at Nominet, and it will not extend your expiry date.
• Ticking the WHOIS opt-out while trading through the domain. The opt-out is only for individuals whose domain is not used for business, and using it anyway is a policy breach.
• Registering .ltd.uk or .plc.uk for a name that does not match Companies House. Most of the .uk family is unpoliced. These two are not.

The rights of registration window, and the morning it closed

Direct .uk did not launch into an empty namespace. When Nominet opened second-level registration at 08:00 BST on 10 June 2014, roughly ten million third-level names already existed, and launching without protecting them would have handed every established British brand's shorter form to whoever typed fastest.

The solution was the rights of registration. Anyone holding a matching .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk, .net.uk, .ltd.uk or .plc.uk registered before 23:59 UTC on 28 October 2013 had the equivalent .uk reserved for them, and only they could take it. Where more than one third-level holder matched the same string, precedence was written into the rules: the .co.uk holder ranked first, so a brand holding brand.co.uk beat the holder of brand.org.uk to brand.uk.

The window ran five years. It ended at 06:00 BST on 25 June 2019, and at that moment every unclaimed .uk fell into open general availability. Names quietly reserved for half a decade became registrable by anyone, and many were taken within hours by investors watching the list. This is why a .co.uk holder today has no automatic claim on the matching .uk. There was also a messy tail: some registrars had registered .uk equivalents for customers free of charge during the reservation period and then began charging for them from September 2019.

The result is visible in the numbers. The most precise dated figure puts the .uk family at 10,508,932 domains in January 2024, split 9,314,572 at the third level against 1,374,360 at the second. Ten years after launch, direct .uk remains roughly a seventh the size of the namespace it was carved out of.