How much does a domain name cost? 17 registrars compared

Nearly every page answering this question is published by a company that sells domains, and nearly all of them quote the price you pay in the first year. That is the least useful number. A business keeps its domain for ten or twenty years, so the price that matters is the renewal, and the renewal is usually twice the first year.

So we read the published .com prices on 20 registrars’ own pages, looked up the registrar behind 121 real local business domains in the public registration records, and worked out what the wholesale price actually is.

How much does a domain name cost at each registrar?

Our own reading of each registrar’s published prices, 14 October 2026; full table with links in our research notes. Prices change often and many sites price by location; first-year prices are frequently promotions. Cloudflare charges at cost but shows prices only inside its dashboard, Register.com redirects to Network Solutions, and Wix did not show a renewal price, so those are left out. Namecheap and GoDaddy add the $0.20 ICANN fee at checkout. Name.com has announced a renewal rise to $21.99 from 31 October 2026.

Three things stand out. Three registrars, Dynadot, Porkbun and NameSilo, charge the same to renew as to register, so the price you see is the price you keep paying. The renewal at the most expensive registrar is almost four times the cheapest for the identical product, because a .com is the same .com wherever it is registered. And the four registrars that still charge for privacy all renew at $22.99 or more.

Why does a domain cost more to renew than to buy?

Because the first year is a promotion and the renewal is the price. Registrars sell the first year at or below cost to win the customer, then rely on most customers never moving.

The deepest discounts carry conditions. GoDaddy’s and Hostinger’s $0.01 .com both need a three-year purchase, so the real upfront cost is $45.99 at GoDaddy and $39.99 at Hostinger. Three years at Porkbun costs $33.24. The cheapest-looking offer was the most expensive over the term it locks you into.

“Free domain” offers with hosting or a website builder work the same way. The domain is free for a year and then renews at the host’s own price:

The median is $21.00, about double the wholesale cost. The free year is real, and it is roughly what the renewal markup recovers in the first year after it.

What does a .com domain actually cost the registrar?

Every .com is run by one registry, Verisign, which charges every registrar the same wholesale fee: $10.26 per domain per year, in force since September 2024. ICANN adds a fee of $0.20 per domain year. So the true floor for a .com is $10.46, and any registrar charging less is losing money on it.

That floor is rising. Verisign announced in April 2026 that the wholesale fee goes from $10.26 to $10.97 on 1 November 2026, the largest rise its contract allows, which puts the floor at $11.17. The contract permits further rises of up to 7% in later years. Registrars pass these on, and some round up: a $0.71 wholesale rise is a $2 rise at Name.com.

From Verisign’s first quarter 2026 results, 23 April 2026, which states the increase “from $10.26 to $10.97 effective Nov. 1, 2026”.

Other endings cost different amounts because they have different registries. Across the registrars that listed them, the median renewal was $19.99 for .net and $19.99 for .org. Newer endings are where the gap between first year and renewal is widest: the median .xyz was $2.42 to register and $19.14 to renew.

Which registrar do local businesses use?

We looked up the domains of 121 US local service businesses from our October 2026 study in the public RDAP registration records, which show which registrar each domain sits with. No business is named.

Our own lookups via rdap.org, 14 October 2026. RDAP shows the sponsoring registrar, not who controls the account: a domain at GoDaddy may be in the business’s own account or in its web designer’s. The renewal a given owner pays can differ from the list price.

Six in ten of these domains sit at GoDaddy, whose .com renewal is listed at $22.99, twice the wholesale cost. The median domain in the sample was registered in 2012, and almost a third before 2010, so most of these owners have been paying the renewal price for over a decade. The difference against an at-cost registrar is about $12 a year. Nobody will go broke on that, and it is the wrong thing to worry about first.

Getting a domain back from someone else’s account is covered step by step in how to get your website back, and the rest of what you should own is in do I own my website?

Is domain privacy worth paying for?

Mostly you should not need to. Twelve of the 17 registrars in our table include privacy free, which hides the owner’s name, address and phone number from the public registration record. Four still charge for it: Network Solutions and Bluehost $11.99 a year, Domain.com after the first month, and HostGator. The seventeenth, IONOS, no longer offers it at all.

One change in 2026 matters for businesses. IONOS has discontinued its privacy service for all domains, citing the EU’s NIS2 cybersecurity law, and since 6 March 2026 it publishes the contact details of any domain registered to a company or organisation in the public WHOIS. A business filling in the company field, as most would, is publishing its contact details. Individuals are still protected under GDPR.

From IONOS’s help page Changes to domain privacy through NIS2, read October 2026.

For a business whose address is already on its website and Google Business Profile, a published contact record is a source of spam, not a security disaster. It is still worth knowing before you fill in the form.

Does hosting cost extra?

Yes. A domain is the name; hosting is the server the website lives on, and on most setups you pay for them separately. Hosting has the same promotional pricing as domains, and a steeper renewal:

Our own reading of each host’s published prices, 14 October 2026. Several hosts show the renewal only in small print.

The median host renews at 2.93 times its introductory price, and the longest promotions need a three or four year prepayment. A domain plus basic hosting for a simple site comes to about $65 a year at the cheapest end and $150 to $240 at typical renewal prices. What that leaves out, and what a site costs once someone maintains it, is in do you have to pay monthly for a website? and website maintenance cost.

How do I buy a domain without overpaying?

Moving a domain takes a few minutes of work and up to about five days to complete: unlock it at the old registrar, get the transfer code, and enter it at the new one. The website and email keep working as long as the DNS settings come across, which is the part to check before you start.

Common questions