How to Check If a Domain Name Is Available

What an availability check is actually asking

A domain is available if, and only if, the registry that operates the extension has no record of it. The registry runs the top-level domain: it operates the authoritative nameservers for the extension and maintains the master database of every name under it. Verisign operates .com and .net, Public Interest Registry operates .org, Nominet operates .uk. They sell wholesale to registrars rather than to you, but the answer to is this name taken originates in their database and nowhere else.

A registrar answers in one of two ways. It can send a live check command to the registry over EPP, the provisioning protocol registrars use to talk to registries, which returns an authoritative yes or no. Or it can look up registration data, which since 28 January 2025 means RDAP: ICANN made RDAP the definitive source for gTLD registration information in place of sunsetted WHOIS services, with .com, .name and .post carved out by legacy commitments. RDAP matters because it answers cleanly, returning a genuine not-found response where WHOIS returned ambiguous free-form text.

The box you type into is a retail interface over one of those queries, trustworthy to the extent that it asked the registry recently and that not currently registered is the question you meant to ask.

Why two registrars can give you different answers

• Caching. Results are cached so search interfaces do not hammer the registry with every keystroke. A name registered minutes ago can still read as free at a checker on a slower refresh cycle, and one released minutes ago can still read as taken.
• Premium and registry-reserved names. Registries withhold labels from general registration, and not the same ones. Operational labels such as nic, whois and rdds are reserved as a matter of course, along with country and territory names and the Olympic and Red Cross protected identifiers. Beyond that the rules diverge: all one-character and two-character .in names are reserved by government and NIXI order, and two-letter .ch names are reserved for Swiss cantons. A reserved name is unregistered at the registry and unavailable to you, a state most checkers have no vocabulary for. Some report it as taken; some report it as available and then fail at checkout.
• Extension coverage. A registrar sells only what it is accredited or contracted for. ICANN accreditation covers generic top-level domains; a country-code extension requires a contract with that national registry. A checker returning nothing for a .fr or a .cn may simply not be a seller.

Premium tiering is the most expensive form of disagreement. A premium name is available, and available at a different price. A checker showing availability but not tier is telling you half the answer.

The checks that look authoritative and are not

Three informal tests circulate widely, and all three produce false positives.

• The website does not load, so the name must be free. A registered domain with no nameservers carries the status inactive: the registration is valid and nothing resolves. A domain under clientHold or serverHold has been pulled out of the DNS deliberately, and registrars apply clientHold for expired registrations, unverified contact details, abuse complaints and unpaid invoices.
• It expired last month, so it should be free by now. Almost certainly not. At expiry the registry auto-renews the name into the auto-renew grace period, standard practice being about 45 days. Only when the registrar sends a delete command does the 30-day Redemption Grace Period begin, and that one is ICANN-mandated for gTLDs. After it comes pending delete, typically five days as registry operational policy rather than ICANN rule, during which nothing can be done by anyone.
• It dropped, so I can register it. Sometimes. Valuable expiring names rarely reach an open drop, because most are intercepted by the registrar's own expired-domain auction platform during the auto-renew grace period, before the delete command is ever sent. What survives is contested by drop-catch services firing large volumes of registration attempts at the release moment.

Reading the registration record resolves all three, because the status codes describe which state the name is in. One trap when moving from WHOIS to RDAP: the names change, so the EPP status ok appears in RDAP as active.

Available does not mean safe to use

An availability check tests one proposition: that nobody has registered this string in this extension. It does not test whether anyone holds rights in the string.

Every gTLD registration agreement incorporates the UDRP. A complainant must prove all three elements: that the name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which they have rights, that you have no rights or legitimate interests in it, and that it has been registered and is being used in bad faith. That third element is conjunctive, and the conjunction works in both directions. It protects a name registered in good faith long before a complainant's mark existed. It does not protect a name you register today because it looked available and happened to match somebody's brand. Remedies are transfer or cancellation only, and a case typically completes within about two months; in the United States, the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act supports court action with monetary damages. The volume is not trivial: WIPO alone managed over 6,200 domain name cases in 2025, its highest caseload on record, and around 80 per cent of its cases concern .com.

The second thing a checker cannot tell you is what the name was used for before. A string free today may have been registered, used, abandoned and dropped. Search it before you commit, and treat an unexplained history as a reason to look harder rather than to hurry.

The renewal price is part of the availability answer

First-year pricing and renewal pricing are independent variables, and only the second one recurs. That is true of promotional discounts and emphatically true of premium tiers, where the gap can persist for the life of the registration.

Registry policies differ in ways invisible at checkout. Radix, which operates .store, .online and .site, states that its premiums sold via EPP renew at the same price as the first-year registration fee: the premium recurs annually, indefinitely, with no standard-rate escape. The .xyz registry runs two premium systems simultaneously that are indistinguishable by registration price alone — variable-price tiers where registration, renewal and transfer carry the same figure every year forever, and the Tier A, B and C names introduced on 1 August 2018 that carry a premium registration price and then renew at standard rates. Neither premium names renew at premium prices nor its opposite is a correct general statement, even within one extension.

Two further points. Some extensions impose minimum terms longer than a year; .ai runs on two-year minimums. And renewal costs drift: legacy gTLDs under registry agreements with limited price-cap protections have an established pattern of increases applied to renewals as well as new registrations, .pro being the documented case. Check the renewal price for the specific name, not for the extension.

Checking one name across many extensions

Running a single string across every extension at once surfaces conflicts before you commit to a brand rather than after. It also raises complications a single .com check never does.

• Availability is not eligibility. A .cn registration requires real-name verification, and one never verified is suspended and then deleted. Registro .it reserves geographic names for the corresponding Italian territorial bodies. A green checkmark says the label is unregistered, not that you qualify to hold it.
• Related names are not reserved for you. The costliest assumption in the UK namespace is that .co.uk and .uk come as a pair. They have not since 06:00 BST on 25 June 2019, when the rights-of-registration window closed and unclaimed .uk names went to open general availability.
• Internationalized forms are separate registrations under separate rules. EURid supports Latin, Cyrillic and Greek in .eu and bundles visually confusable variants so only one name in a bundle can be registered at all. Registro .it forbids mixing characters from different scripts and remaps Greek composite characters, so the string you request may not be the string you get. The .ai registry does not support internationalized labels at all.
• Label syntax constrains the list. Labels use letters, digits and hyphens, with no leading or trailing hyphen, and hyphens in the third and fourth positions are reserved for the xn-- prefix.

What to verify before you register

• The renewal price for that exact name, and whether the registry classes it in a premium tier that recurs.
• Whether the extension imposes conditions you cannot satisfy — minimum terms, local presence, eligibility criteria, or a verification step that will suspend the name if you skip it.
• Whether anyone holds trademark rights in the string, in the markets where you will actually trade. This is the check that converts an available name into a safe one.
• Whether the name has been registered before, and what it was used for.
• The registrar you are about to commit to. The Transfer Policy permits the registrar of record to deny a transfer requested within 60 days of the creation date, and virtually every registrar enforces it. Evaluate renewal pricing, whether you can generate an authorization code yourself, and whether the account supports two-factor authentication before you register rather than after.
• The registrant email address you supply. It is the recovery channel for the registrar account, which is the control channel for the domain. Put it on a different domain from the one you are registering, at a mailbox more than one person can reach, with its own two-factor authentication. Registrants are contractually obliged to keep registration data accurate and to respond to registrar enquiries within fifteen days.

What happens in the first hours after you register

• The status will read inactive. No nameservers have been associated with the domain, so it is not activated in the DNS and will not resolve. That is a configuration gap, not a fault, and it persists until you both delegate nameservers at the registrar and create the zone at whoever operates them. Changing nameservers changes the delegation; it does not create or move a single record.
• The name enters the Add Grace Period, the five days following initial registration. ICANN's AGP Limits Policy caps registry refunds for deletions within it at the greater of ten per cent of the registrar's net new registrations that month or fifty names, so cancellation with a refund is a registrar concession rather than a right.
• Your registrar will probably set clientTransferProhibited. This is the standard registrar lock, it is free, it is the most effective single defense against an unauthorized transfer, and you should leave it on. Note that a domain showing only that status will not also show ok, because ok cannot appear alongside any other status.
• The 60-day post-creation transfer restriction runs from the creation date, not from the day you decide you would rather be somewhere else.

Two things to do the same day: turn auto-renew on and confirm which payment method it will use, then set an independent calendar reminder for the renewal date, somewhere that does not depend on a registrar email reaching a mailbox somebody is still reading in three years.