How much does a domain cost? Domain name cost per year, .com prices, and renewal costs

For a standard extension you are registering fresh, budget $10 to $20 a year. That band covers .com, .net, .org and most of the established alternatives at mainstream registrars. Anything advertised well below it is a first-year promotion, and anything well above it is either a premium extension or a registrar charging for the convenience of bundling.

Domains are leased, not bought outright. You pay per year, in one to ten year terms, and ICANN rules cap a single registration at ten years. Nothing you can buy makes a name yours permanently. If you stop paying, the name enters an expiry cycle and eventually returns to the open pool, where anyone can take it.

The practical way to budget is to multiply the renewal price by however many years you realistically expect to keep the name, then add the recurring extras you will not cancel: WHOIS privacy if your registrar charges for it, and DNS or email add-ons if you buy them there. A domain you keep for a decade is one purchase decision and nine renewal charges.

Because the first year was a customer acquisition cost and the renewal is the actual product. Registrars compete on the number you see at checkout, so they discount year one heavily, sometimes below what they pay the registry, and recover it from year two onward. A $1.99 first year renewing at $21.99 is not unusual, and it is disclosed, just not prominently.

This is the single most expensive mistake in domain buying, and it is entirely avoidable. Before you register anywhere, find the renewal price rather than the promotional price. It is normally on the same pricing page one column over, or in the fine print under the add-to-cart button. If a registrar makes the renewal price hard to find, treat that as the answer.

The math is unforgiving at portfolio scale. A $12 a year difference on renewals is $120 over a decade for one name, and $3,600 across thirty names. That is far more than any first-year promotion can save you, which is why experienced buyers ignore the promo entirely and sort registrars by renewal cost.

A .com has a floor price nobody can undercut, because Verisign operates the .com registry and every registrar pays the same wholesale rate. That rate is $10.26 a year, and Verisign has announced a 7 percent increase to $10.97 effective November 1, 2026. Add the ICANN transaction fee of $0.20 per domain year, and $11.17 is roughly the hard cost of a .com before any registrar has earned a cent.

That is why .com retail prices cluster where they do. Cloudflare Registrar sells at registry cost with no markup as a published policy, so it lands just above the wholesale figure. Porkbun, NameSilo, Namecheap and Dynadot take a thin margin. GoDaddy and the bundled hosting companies take a wider one in exchange for support, extensions and everything else on the invoice.

Expect the floor to keep moving. Verisign is contractually allowed to raise .com prices by up to 7 percent in each of the last four years of its six year contract cycles. If it exercises that right every time, the wholesale price reaches $13.42 by the end of the current cycle, and retail .com prices will follow it. Registering or renewing for multiple years locks in the current rate before an increase lands.

Extension choice moves your annual cost more than registrar choice does. The legacy extensions are cheap because their registries are old, huge and price competitive. The tech extensions are expensive because their registries price for a smaller, wealthier audience that wants a short memorable name badly enough to pay.

Two extensions have quirks worth knowing before you commit. A .ai registration has a two year minimum, so your first invoice is double the annual figure. And nearly every registry reserves a set of desirable names as registry premiums, priced in the hundreds or thousands per year, every year, forever. A registry premium is not a one-time purchase, and that recurring cost has surprised many buyers who thought they had found a bargain.

Once a name is registered, the registry price stops mattering. The owner sets the price, and there is no ceiling and no obligation to be reasonable. Most aftermarket sales land in the hundreds to low thousands. A short, real-word .com clears five figures routinely. The famous six and seven figure sales are real but rare, and they are the names a specific company needs rather than merely likes.

Three routes lead to a taken name, at three different price points. If the owner has listed it on a marketplace, you pay the asking price or negotiate down from it. If it is heading to auction because the owner let it expire, you bid, and expired auctions often close in the low hundreds. If it is not listed at all, you approach the owner directly and pay the premium that comes with an unsolicited offer, which is why a broker on that kind of deal typically charges 10 to 20 percent of the sale price.

The reason an appraisal matters here is that you are negotiating against a number the seller invented. A price estimate built from length, extension, keyword demand and comparable sales gives you a reference point to argue from and a ceiling to walk away at. It is decision support, not a valuation you can take to a bank, and it will not tell you what one motivated buyer would pay.

The advertised price covers registration and nothing else. Four other charges show up often enough that they belong in any honest budget.

For a US small business registering a name that is available, the honest answer is that the domain is the cheapest line item in the entire launch. Fifteen dollars a year is not a decision worth agonizing over, and the temptation to save four dollars by picking a worse extension costs far more in the long run than it saves.

The real business cost appears when the name that matches your company is already taken, which for any ordinary English word or two word combination it usually is. At that point you are choosing between a four or five figure acquisition, a compromise name with a hyphen or an unusual extension, or renaming the business. Companies that treat that as a branding budget rather than a hosting expense tend to make a better decision.

One useful frame: compare the acquisition price against what you will spend making a weaker name work. If a mismatched name costs you spelling corrections on every call, lost direct traffic, and paid search spend to outrank the company that owns the .com, a one time four figure purchase stops looking expensive.

Nothing here is clever. It is the same short list every experienced buyer follows, and it is worth more than any coupon.