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What is domain expiry?

Last updated .

Domain expiry is the date on which a domain registration ends if it has not been renewed. A domain is rented for a period, commonly one to ten years, and the registry holds the end date.

Definition
Domain expiry
The date on which a domain registration ends unless it is renewed, after which the website and email stop working.

What happens afterwards

Stages and lengths vary by registrar and top-level domain. Typically the registrar may keep the name working for a short grace period, then park or disable it, then for many generic domains a redemption period follows in which the owner can still recover the name, usually at a higher fee, and finally the name is deleted and anyone can register it. The website, email and certificates tied to the name fail together.

Why it is missed

Reminders go to the registrant contact, which may be a former employee. Auto-renew fails silently when the card expires. Transfers between registrars often switch auto-renew off.

How to read the date

Through RDAP, which exposes an expiration event, or through the registrar. Some registries publish no date; that is an unknown, not a safe answer.

The registry’s RDAP server is listed in IANA’s bootstrap file at https://data.iana.org/rdap/dns.json. Add /domain/example.com to that base URL and the JSON answer has an events array with an item whose eventAction is expiration and whose eventDate is the end of the registration. Set alerts at 60, 30, 14 and 7 days, and send them to a shared mailbox, not to one person’s address. A registry that publishes no expiration event leaves the date unknown, and the monitor should say so.

What to check

The date, the payment method behind auto-renew and who receives the reminders, with alerts at 60, 30, 14 and 7 days.

Sources

Read on . Standards and vendor pages change; confirm the current text before you rely on it.

Guides that use this term

  • RegistrarA registrar is the company through which a domain is bought and renewed. What it controls, what the registry does and why the registrar account matters for client sites.
  • RDAPRDAP is the standard, JSON-based way to look up domain registration data, including the expiry date. How it differs from WHOIS and what its events list contains.
  • WHOISWHOIS is the older text-based service for looking up who registered a domain and when it expires. Why its format varies and why RDAP is replacing it.

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