Can You Buy a Domain Name Permanently? How Domain Registration Periods Work

Applies to: generic top-level domains (.com.net.org and other gTLDs) under ICANN policy; expiry lookups tested with whois 5.6.3 and RDAP

You can’t buy a domain name permanently. A domain is registered for a period, according to ICANN typically one to ten years, and you keep it for as long as you renew it. What you can do is make it very hard to lose: register for a long period, turn on auto-renew and keep your contact details up to date.

Why there is no lifetime domain

The registries that run each extension only store an expiry date. For .com, the registry agreement with ICANN allows initial registrations of up to ten years and renewals that don’t exceed a total of ten years. Renewing early adds years, but the expiry date can never be more than ten years ahead. Country-code domains, such as .in or .uk, follow their own registry’s rules.

If you see a “lifetime domain” offer, ask who is named as the registrant and how the renewals will be paid. The registry still only knows an expiry date at most ten years away.

How to keep your domain for good

1. Register or renew for a longer period. Several years at once means fewer renewals to miss. You can add years later, up to the ten-year limit.
2. Turn on auto-renew and keep the payment method current; ICANN advises exactly that for anyone who uses auto-renew.
3. Keep the registrant email address working. For gTLDs, ICANN requires registrars to send renewal reminders about one month and one week before the expiry date, and another within five days after it. If that is an old mailbox you no longer read, you won’t see them. Avoid using an address on the same domain: once the domain expires, its email stops too.
4. Make sure the domain is in your name, or your company’s, not a web designer’s. See ICANN and WHOIS verification.
5. Keep the transfer lock on. It shows as clientTransferProhibited in a WHOIS lookup and tells the registry to reject transfers to another registrar until you remove it.
6. Note the expiry date in your own calendar as well.

Check a domain’s expiry date

$ whois example.com | grep -iE "Registry Expiry Date|Domain Status"
   Registry Expiry Date: 2027-08-13T04:00:00Z
   Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited
   Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
   Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited

RDAP gives the same data in JSON. For .com the query curl -s https://rdap.verisign.com/com/v1/domain/example.com returned an expiration event with the same date. More about the tool: the whois command.

What happens if a domain expires

Under ICANN’s Expired Registration Recovery Policy for gTLDs:

• After the expiry date, the registrar must still let you renew the domain, for at least eight days.
• For at least the last eight of those days, the registrar interrupts the domain’s DNS: your website and email stop working, or visitors see a page saying the domain has expired.
• Once the registration is deleted, the registry keeps it in a 30-day Redemption Grace Period, during which the registrar that deleted it can restore it for you.
• According to ICANN’s renewal FAQ, a 5-day pending delete follows, and then anyone can register the name.

The exact stages for your domain: stages before an expired domain becomes available.

To register a new domain or several years at once, use the Ucartz domain search. Background: what a domain is and what a nameserver is.

Official documentation: ICANN: domain name renewals and expiration and Expired Registration Recovery Policy.