---
title: How to Choose a Domain Name in 2026 (and What It Costs) | Opulon
description: "How to choose a domain name in 2026 and what it costs to own, priced from the registries up rather than registrar promos: renewals, expiry, and who really owns it."
image: https://opulon.org/images/blog/how-to-choose-a-domain-name.webp
---

[Web & Design](https://opulon.org/blog?cat=web-design)

# How to Choose a Domain Name in 2026 (and What It Actually Costs to Own One)

- Published — September 23, 2026

![How to choose a domain name in 2026 — registry cost, renewal price and ownership](https://opulon.org/images/blog/how-to-choose-a-domain-name.webp)

Short answer: pick the shortest name a stranger can spell after hearing it once, put it on .com if you sell across borders and on your country's domain if you do not, and register it yourself, in an account only you control. A .com costs every registrar the same $10.26 a year at the registry, $10.97 from 1 November 2026, plus $0.20 to ICANN; at cost that is $10.46, and at a typical retail registrar $18 to $23 once the first-year discount ends. What goes wrong is a renewal price nobody checked, or a domain that turns out to sit in someone else's account.

The wholesale price of a .com is public. Verisign, which operates the .com registry under an agreement with ICANN, charges registrars **$10.26 a year** for each new and renewed name, and on 1 November 2026 that fee rises 7 percent to $10.97 (Verisign, April 2026). ICANN adds $0.20 per domain per year (ICANN, July 2025). So a .com costs the company selling it $10.46 today and $11.17 from November, whoever that company is. The dozen pages that rank for “how much does a domain name cost” quote retail ranges of $10 to $20, first-year offers of $0.99 and “premium” names in the thousands. None of them prints the wholesale figure their prices are built on, because every one of them belongs to a registrar or a website builder that resells domains.

The question is being asked more often. In the search-demand data we pulled for this piece, searches for how to choose a domain name more than tripled in a year, and searches for Cloudflare’s registrar, which sells domains for exactly the wholesale price, tripled alongside them. Buyers have started to notice that the cheapest permanent asset a business owns comes with the least transparent price tag. What follows picks the name first, then prices it from the registry up, then covers what the registrar guides leave out: what the renewal costs over ten years, and who owns the domain when somebody else registered it for you.

## What makes a good domain name in 2026?

A good domain name is the name of the business, spelled the way people hear it, on an extension they expect. The name comes first and the domain follows; if you are still choosing the name, [how to name a business you can actually own](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-name-a-business) covers the types of name, the availability checks and the trademark question, and this article picks up where its third check leaves off.

- **Say it once, out loud.** Read the name to someone over the phone and ask them to type it. Numbers, hyphens and creative spellings all fail here: “for” or “4”, “colour” or “color”, “best-roofing” or “bestroofing”. Google’s guidance recommends hyphens between words in URL paths (Google Search Central, 2025), but that is advice about pages, not addresses; in a domain, a hyphen is a word you have to say every time. In the largest academic census of .com names, the average name before the dot was 13.3 characters (Lindenthal, 2016). Shorter than average is a fair target; surviving a phone call is the real one.
- **Choose a brand, not a search phrase.** Domains stuffed with keywords were a ranking tactic fifteen years ago and are a liability now. John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate, put it in one sentence: “A keyword domain name is not going to give you any recognizable SEO advantage on Google” (Search Engine Journal, December 2023). A name like cheap-roofing-austin.com signals what the business is not: memorable, transferable, or likely to be recommended by name.
- **Type it into Google and into an AI assistant**, then read the first screen as a stranger would. This is the collision test from the naming article, and in 2026 it matters more than the keyword question ever did, because assistants recommend businesses by name and cite their own websites. When we probed ChatGPT for Slovak agencies while writing [how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business](https://opulon.org/blog/chatgpt-seo), every recommendation cited the agency’s own site. A domain that matches the name you are known by is how the citation and the address line up; a domain that shares its name with a town, a dictionary word or a larger company in a nearby field will spend years being confused with them.

**Should the LLC or the s.r.o. go in the domain?** No. The legal form belongs on invoices and contracts; the domain is the name customers use, and if the company ever changes form the domain would carry the wrong suffix forever. **What should you avoid?** Anything that fails the phone test, anything that matches a registered trademark in your field (the dispute procedure and its price are below), and any extension whose renewal price you have not read.

## Which domain extension should you choose?

Choose .com if you sell across borders, your country’s domain if you sell in one country, and both if the .com is free, with one redirecting to the other.

There are four kinds of top-level domain. Generic ones (.com, .net, .org) are open to anyone. Country codes (.sk, .de, .co.uk) belong to a country and follow its registry’s rules. The newer generic extensions (.app, .store, .online, most of what has launched since 2012) are open too, usually priced higher and marketed harder. Sponsored ones (.gov, .edu) are restricted. As of June 2026 there were **401.6 million** domain names registered in the world: 166.6 million of them .com, 148.6 million under country codes and 52.9 million under the newer generics (Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, July 2026). Four names in ten are .com, and the market prices that habit: in Sedo’s 2025 aftermarket data the median .com sale was $595 and .com accounted for 66 percent of all sales (Global Domain Report 2026, via Domain Name Wire, March 2026).

A country-code domain does one thing a .com cannot. Google’s documentation says a ccTLD provides “a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country” (Google Search Central, December 2025). A plumber in Košice on a .sk address is telling both the customer and the search engine where the business is; the same plumber on a .com has to supply that signal through the site itself. The same document lists the country codes Google treats as generic because the world uses them that way: .ai, .co, .io, .me, .tv, .cc, .fm and a dozen more, plus the regional .eu and .asia. Those carry no country signal, which is why startups like them, but each is still a country’s code with a country’s rules.

Anguilla’s .ai shows what that means in money. Since January 2025 the registry has been operated by Identity Digital, which reported more than 600,000 registered names at the handover (Identity Digital, January 2025). Registrations run in two-year terms, and the wholesale fee rose to $160 per term on 5 March 2026 (Domain Name Wire, February 2026), which is why retail lands near $83 a year (Porkbun, September 2026). Buying a .ai is buying a fashionable address from a Caribbean territory at roughly eight times the price of a .com. That can be the right call for a company whose name is literally its .ai; it is an expensive habit for anyone else.

The European .eu shows what it means in law. EURid, the .eu registry, allows registration by organisations established in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway, by residents of those countries, and by their citizens wherever they live (EURid, 2026). When the United Kingdom left, more than **81,000 .eu names** held by UK registrants were suspended on 1 January 2021, withdrawn on 1 July 2021, and revoked and released for anyone to register on 3 January 2022 (EURid, 2021 and 2022). Businesses that had built on those addresses lost them. A country code is a contract with a country; read the eligibility rule before you build a brand on it.

The newer generic extensions are a branding choice, and the price to read is the second year. At Porkbun in September 2026 a .online costs $1.96 for the first year and $28.84 a year after that; a .store $2.57, then $43.77; a .io $28.12, then $51.80 (Porkbun, 2026). Namecheap’s .co is $7.98 in year one and $38.48 at renewal (Namecheap, 2026). Registries can also flag individual names as premium, with a higher fee that recurs every year rather than once; the checkout shows the renewal price, and it is the only number on the page that matters.

One more extension question is settled for now. ICANN accepted applications for new top-level domains between 30 April and 12 August 2026, at an evaluation fee of $227,000 per application (ICANN, 2026). Brand-owned extensions will arrive from that round in 2027 and 2028. They are a corporate purchase; for a small business the only effect is a few more suffixes to ignore.

## How much does a domain name cost in 2026?

At cost, a .com is $10.46 a year. At a typical retail registrar it is $18 to $23 a year once the introductory price ends, and the introductory price can be a cent. The table separates the layers the registrar guides collapse into one.

| Extension | What the registry charges | At-cost or flat-price retail | Typical retail, first year → renewal |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **.com** | $10.26 + $0.20 ICANN = $10.46; $11.17 from 1 Nov 2026 (Verisign and ICANN, 2025–2026) | Cloudflare sells “at or below what registries and ICANN charge us” (Cloudflare, 2026); Porkbun $11.08 in every year (Porkbun, 2026) | GoDaddy $0.01 with a 3-year purchase, then $22.99 a year; Namecheap $10.98, then $18.48; Squarespace $20 in every year (vendor pages, September 2026) |
| **.net** | $10.91, rising to $12.00 on 1 March 2027 (Verisign, August 2026) |  | |
| **.sk** | 10 € a year without VAT, registration and renewal alike (SK-NIC price list, April 2025) | HostCreators 9,50 €, then 11,00 € | Websupport 9,90 €, then 17,40 €; Active24 9,90 €, then 16,90 €; Webglobe 4,99 €, then 17,99 € (vendor pages, September 2026, without VAT) |
| **.eu** | 4,60 € a year at EURid (EURid, 2026) |  | Websupport 6,90 €, then 11,90 €; Active24 7,90 €, then 10,90 €; Webglobe 0,99 €, then 11,99 € (vendor pages, September 2026, without VAT) |
| **.ai** | $160 per two-year term (Domain Name Wire, February 2026) | Porkbun $82.70 a year | |
| **.io / .co** |  | Porkbun .io $28.12 → $51.80; .co $15.76 → $31.20 | Namecheap .io $34.98 → $65.98; .co $7.98 → $38.48 |
| **.online / .store** |  | Porkbun .online $1.96 → $28.84; .store $2.57 → $43.77 | |

**Privacy is no longer a paid extra.** GoDaddy has included it free since 2022, Namecheap calls it “free for life”, and Cloudflare, Porkbun and Squarespace bundle it (vendor pages, 2026). It became free because since 21 August 2025 ICANN’s Registration Data Policy has required registrars to redact the registrant’s name, email, address and phone number from the public record anyway (ICANN, 2025). A registrar still charging for “WHOIS privacy” on a .com is charging for the weather.

**There is no monthly price.** Registrations are sold in whole years and prepaid, one to ten at a time under most registries’ rules (SK-NIC’s, for instance, allow exactly that range); searches for “domain name cost per month” are answered by dividing by twelve, and searches for buying one permanently are answered with no. A renewal is charged at whatever the price is when it falls due, which for .com is rising by contract: Verisign may raise the wholesale fee by up to 7 percent in each of the last four years of every six-year period (Cooperative Agreement, Amendment 35, 2018; .com Registry Agreement, 2024). If it takes every increase the agreement allows, the wholesale price reaches about $13.44 in 2029; that is arithmetic on the cap, not a forecast.

**The domain is the same domain at every price.** Over ten years, a .com at Porkbun’s flat $11.08 costs about $111. At Namecheap, one discounted year and nine renewals come to about $177. At GoDaddy, the one-cent first year requires a three-year purchase at $22.99 for the other two, and ten years at that rate come to about $207. The extra $66 to $96 buys the same address, the same DNS and, at all three, the same free privacy. Where that money goes is the subject of the next section.

## Why is the renewal price different from the first-year price?

The first year is marketing and the renewal is the business. The registry charges the same fee for a new registration and a renewal, so every difference between a $0.99 first year and a $22.99 second year is the registrar’s margin, priced on the assumption that you will not move.

The assumption is usually right, and the same logic sells the “free domain” inside website-builder plans. Squarespace’s help centre states it plainly: the domain is free “for the first year, starting from the date it’s registered or transferred”, and “after the first year of domain service, your domain will renew at the annual TLD price”, which for a .com is $20 (Squarespace, March and August 2026). Wix’s version: the voucher “covers the first year of a Wix domain subscription”, and “if you purchased your domain using this voucher, you will need to pay if you want to renew it” (Wix, 2026). Both are stated in the help pages, and both count on the renewal.

You are allowed to leave. ICANN’s Transfer Policy requires that “Registered Name Holders must be able to transfer their domain name registrations between Registrars” (ICANN, 2024). A transfer normally costs one year’s registration at the new registrar and adds that year to the term, so moving a promo-priced domain in month eleven is the rational play. Two locks apply. A registrar may deny a transfer “requested within 60 days of the creation date”, and after a change of registrant “the Registrar must impose a 60-day inter-registrar transfer lock” unless you opted out in advance (ICANN Transfer Policy, 2024). A revised policy that would shorten the first lock to 30 days and remove the second was approved by ICANN’s policy council in March 2025, but the ICANN Board had not adopted it as of April 2026 (GNSO, 2026), so the 60-day rules still stand.

## What does it cost when the name you want is taken?

A taken .com changes hands for a few hundred dollars at the median and for millions at the top, and the median is the number a small business should plan around. Sedo’s 2025 data puts the median sale at $818 across all extensions and **$595 for a .com** (Global Domain Report 2026, via Domain Name Wire, March 2026). Across the roughly 190,000 sales NameBio recorded in 2025, worth $244 million in total, 72 percent of the money went to .com names (NamePros analysis of NameBio data, January 2026). The headline sales are a different market: AI.com sold for $70 million this year (DNJournal, August 2026), which has as much to do with your bakery’s domain as a penthouse has to do with your rent.

Finding the owner is harder than it was. Because registrars now redact registrant details, the public record shows a contact form or an anonymised email address instead of a name (ICANN Registration Data Policy, 2025). Write through it, state a price, and expect silence or a counter-offer. If you would rather not negotiate yourself, GoDaddy’s brokerage charges $99.99 per domain plus 20 percent of the sale price, and the fee is non-refundable whether or not the owner sells (GoDaddy, 2026). Waiting for a name to expire is a long shot: GoDaddy retired its own backorder product in 2025 (GoDaddy, 2025), and the dedicated drop-catching services charge on success, around $59 for a .com according to a June 2026 industry guide, with an auction if more than one buyer backordered the same name.

Walk away if the holder is an active business in a nearby field, because you would be buying a permanent case of mistaken identity, and a different name is cheaper than that domain. Walk away, too, if the name matches a registered trademark, because the domain can be taken from you. Under ICANN’s dispute policy a trademark owner must prove all of the following: that the domain “is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights”, that you have “no rights or legitimate interests” in it, and that it “has been registered and is being used in bad faith” (UDRP, paragraph 4(a)). Filing at WIPO costs the complainant $1,500 for a single-panelist case covering up to five domains (WIPO, 2026). The search that avoids all of this is free at the USPTO and at the EU’s TMview, and a US trademark application is $350 per class (USPTO fee schedule, 2025); [the branding-cost breakdown](https://opulon.org/blog/branding-cost) has the EU and Slovak fees.

## Who actually owns your domain?

The domain belongs to whoever is listed as the registrant, and if an organisation is named, to the organisation. ICANN’s statement of registrant rights says so directly: “Whoever is listed as the Registered Name Holder must provide full contact information, and is the Registered Name Holder of record” (ICANN, 2011). GoDaddy’s help pages add the detail that decides most disputes: “If a Registrant Organization is provided, it becomes the Registered Name Holder per ICANN policy” (GoDaddy, 2026). Squarespace’s version notes that domain emails go to the registrant’s address, which “isn’t necessarily the same as the one you use to log into your Squarespace account” (Squarespace, June 2026). The three fields that decide it are the registrant name, the registrant organisation and the registrant email; if any of them is not you or your company, the domain is not fully yours.

This is the section registrars do not write, because their customer is whoever holds the account, and it is where we see the most damage. Bill Hartzer, who investigates domain disputes, described the pattern in July 2026: “A business hires a web designer or developer to build and maintain its website. The developer, as a matter of convenience, registers the company’s domain name and is listed as the registrant of record.” The relationship sours, the developer moves the domain into an account the business cannot reach, and a demand follows (Hartzer, 2026). He looked for a dispute decision that returned such a domain to the business and could not find one. Domain Name Wire’s advice from 2019 has not aged: “Please, don’t give your web developer full access to your domain name registrar account” (Domain Name Wire, 2019).

The rules that prevent it take ten minutes.

- **Your account, your card, your email.** Open the registrar account yourself, pay with a company card that will not expire quietly, and put a monitored company mailbox in the registrant email field rather than a person’s inbox that leaves with them.
- **Organisation field: your company.** That single field is what ICANN policy treats as the holder.
- **Two-factor authentication on, auto-renew on**, and the renewal date in the same calendar as the tax deadlines.
- **Give developers DNS access, not the registrar login.** Every serious registrar offers delegated access or lets you point the name servers elsewhere; a developer who needs to change a record needs that and nothing more. Moving a domain between accounts is one-way: Namecheap’s help centre warns that “the domain ownership change is final, and we will not be able to reverse it” (Namecheap, 2025).
- **Keep the domain and the hosting apart.** A hosting dispute, an unpaid invoice or a builder closing a plan should never be able to take the address with it. This is how we set up client domains, and it is why we would rather a client registered the domain themselves than have us do it for them.

## What happens when a domain expires?

An expired domain passes through three stages before anyone else can register it, and each stage costs more than the last. ICANN requires registrars to notify you “at least two times”, roughly a month and a week before expiry (Expired Registration Recovery Policy, 2013). After the date, most registrars hold the name for a period during which you can still renew at the normal price; GoDaddy’s published timeline moves a domain out of the account at 18 days, recoverable “with an additional redemption fee”, and removes it entirely at 72 days (GoDaddy, 2026). Behind the registrar sits the registry’s Redemption Grace Period of 30 days, during which the registrar “must permit” you to redeem the name (ERRP, 2013), at a price: Namecheap lists **$88.48** to restore a .com, renewal included (Namecheap, 2026). After that the name is deleted and the drop-catchers take it. Country registries run their own versions: an expired .sk sits in a 40-day protective period during which the site and email stop resolving but the holder can still renew, and from 1 November 2026 names that are not renewed go to a public auction before deletion, with starting prices of 20, 50 or 200 € (SK-NIC rules, 2024; auction conditions, September 2026).

The reminders come from your registrar, to the registrant email. Anything else is a solicitation: “domain renewal” invoices from companies you have never dealt with are a standing industry, and the tell is that the sender is not the company you pay. Auto-renew, a card that works and a mailbox someone reads are the whole defence.

People also ask whether a domain is worth paying for and whether domain names are worth money. A domain is worth the renewal fee to its owner and, unless it is short, generic or someone else’s brand, almost nothing to anyone else. Its value to you is the cost of not having it: reprinting, re-ranking, re-teaching every customer and every AI assistant a new address. For $10 to $20 a year, it is the cheapest insurance a business buys.

## Does it matter where you register a domain?

Yes, and the first-year price is the least of it. What differs between registrars is the renewal price; whether privacy is included (at the five named here, it is); whether the account and the registrant fields are yours, which the bundled “free domain” quietly decides for you; how easy leaving is, since the 60-day lock is ICANN’s but the transfer flow is the registrar’s; and basic security, meaning two-factor authentication and a DNS service that stays up. You do not need a company to register a domain, you do not need to buy hosting with it, and you can do it yourself in the time it takes to read this section. The registrars that make the renewal price hard to find are telling you where they earn.

A fair way to buy a domain in 2026: choose the name with the phone test and the assistant test, check the trademark registers before you grow attached to it, register the .com or the country code (or both) in your own account with your company in the organisation field, read the renewal line before you pay, and put the renewal date where you will see it. The address is settled in an afternoon; what goes on the site is the longer question, and [what a website actually costs](https://opulon.org/blog/website-cost) and [whether you need one yet](https://opulon.org/blog/do-i-need-a-website) take it from here. Choosing a name that people and machines can find, and building the site that lives on it, is work we do in [branding](https://opulon.org/services/branding) and [web development](https://opulon.org/services/web-app-development); if you would like a second opinion on the shortlist, [send it over](https://opulon.org/contact).

[Back to all articles](https://opulon.org/blog)

## Keep reading

[![How to name a business — name types, availability checks and the findability test](https://opulon.org/images/blog/how-to-name-a-business.webp)How to Name a Business You Can Actually Own (and That Machines Can Find)](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-name-a-business)

[Web & Design](https://opulon.org/blog?cat=web-design)

## [How to Name a Business You Can Actually Own (and That Machines Can Find)](https://opulon.org/blog/how-to-name-a-business)

- August 26, 2026

[![Do I need a website for my business — an honest decision guide](https://opulon.org/images/blog/do-i-need-a-website.webp)Do I Need a Website for My Business in 2026? An Honest Answer](https://opulon.org/blog/do-i-need-a-website)

[Web & Design](https://opulon.org/blog?cat=web-design)

## [Do I Need a Website for My Business in 2026? An Honest Answer](https://opulon.org/blog/do-i-need-a-website)

- August 5, 2026

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