What domain registrars charge to renew
Where the first year is a promotion, the renewal is the price. Here is what 12 registrars charge to hold a standard .com for a year, read off their own pricing pages rather than a comparison site.
- Registrars priced
- 12
- Cheapest .com renewal
- $9.98
- Dearest .com renewal
- $38.38
- Prices checked
On this page
How to read this
- Sorted by renewal
- Cheapest first. The order is arithmetic, not an opinion, and nothing has been moved.
- Nothing is guessed
- A — means the registrar sells it and does not publish a figure we could read. It never means free.
- One link pays us
- Dynadot is the only registrar here we have a commercial relationship with, and its row is labelled. Above it in the table sit 2 registrars that renew cheaper and pay us nothing. Every other name links straight to that registrar's own price page, with no parameter of ours attached.
What each one charges
Standard, non-premium, one year, in US dollars. The spread between the cheapest and dearest renewal is $28.20 all-in, per name per year — on a hundred domains that is the difference between a rounding error and a real line in the accounts.
| Registrar | First year | Renewal | Transfer in | ICANN fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spaceship | $8.88* | $9.98 | $9.48* | Added, $0.20 |
| Cloudflare Registrar | At cost | At cost | At cost | Passed through |
| Dynadot | $10.88 | $10.88 | $10.49* | Not itemised |
| Porkbun | $11.08 | $11.08 | — | Included |
| OVHcloud | $9.20 | $14.69 | $9.20 | Included |
| Amazon Route 53 | $16.00 | $16.00 | $16.00 | Excluded |
| Namecheap | $11.28* | $18.48 | $11.48* | Added, $0.20 |
| Name.com | $12.99* | $19.99 | $17.99 | Not itemised |
| IONOS | $1* | $20.00 | $9.50 | Included |
| Squarespace Domains | About $20 | About $20 | — | Varies by TLD |
| GoDaddy | $0.01* | $22.99 | $0.01* | Added, $0.20 |
| Gandi | $11 | $38.38 | $11 | Not itemised |
- *
- Promotional or introductory rate
- —
- Not published by the registrar
- †
- Paid link · we may earn a commission — we may earn a commission if you transact there, at no extra cost to you. How this is funded
Held for a year, 100 .com names
All-in, so the $0.20 that Spaceship, Namecheap and GoDaddy add at the till is counted rather than left off the number they advertise.
- At Spaceship
- $1,018
- At Gandi
- $3,838
- Difference, per year
- $2,820
- Over five years
- $14,100
The floor under the price
A registrar does not set the whole price. Verisign charges every registrar the same wholesale fee for a .com, and ICANN charges a further $0.20 for each year added by a registration, renewal or transfer. Those two numbers are what a .com costs a registrar before it has paid for a single support ticket.
Verisign has already announced an increase, so the floor is dated rather than fixed:
| Charge | To 31 Oct 2026 | From 1 November 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Verisign .com registry fee | $10.26 | $10.97 |
| ICANN transaction fee | $0.20 | $0.20 |
| What a .com costs the registrar | $10.46 | $11.17 |
Hold that number against the top of the table and the cheap end stops looking like a durable saving. Spaceship's $9.98 plus the $0.20 it adds separately comes to $10.18 — less than the $10.46 that same year already costs Spaceship. That is a customer-acquisition price, not a business model.
Three of the four cheapest rows here are priced below what a .com will cost their registrar from 1 November 2026. The fourth, Cloudflare, tracks the registry fee by design and will simply move with it. Everyone else has a decision to make, which makes the cheapest rows in this table the ones most likely to have changed by the time you read them. If you are moving a portfolio on the strength of a $1 gap, check the price at the till before you commit to it.
Verisign publishes the registry fee directly. The ICANN charge is passed through explicitly by Namecheap, GoDaddy and Spaceship, included in the advertised price by Porkbun and IONOS, and left unitemised by most of the rest — which is the whole reason the table has a column for it.
Row by row
Price is one column of six, and on a portfolio it is rarely the column that decides. What each row does not say:
Spaceship
$9.98 / yearThe lowest renewal here, and the one least likely to hold: $9.98 plus the $0.20 fee is below what the registry currently charges Spaceship for the same year. Privacy is blocked by registry policy on some extensions, .ca among them.
Cloudflare Registrar
At cost / yearNo registrar markup at all — you pay the registry fee plus the ICANN charge, which is about $10.46 on a .com today. The trade is structural rather than commercial: a domain registered here has to stay on Cloudflare's assigned nameservers, so it is the wrong choice if you need independent authoritative DNS or expect to move DNS provider.
Dynadot
$10.88 / yearSeventy cents a year above the cheapest all-in row, while carrying bulk management, an API, and its own expired auctions and backorders in the same account — which is the reason a portfolio ends up here rather than at the lowest number in the table. It does not publish .net and .org renewals in a form we could read.
Porkbun
$11.08 / yearThe advertised price includes ICANN and other applicable fees, so the number on the page is the number you pay — which is rarer than it should be. The API is unusually broad for a low-cost registrar, covering registration, DNS, DNSSEC, SSL, email forwarding and aftermarket operations. Porkbun has said publicly that it expects to adjust .com after the November wholesale increase.
OVHcloud
$14.69 / yearThese are the global USD figures. OVHcloud prices are strongly localised and a European checkout can differ materially before VAT is even counted, so treat this row as indicative outside the US.
Amazon Route 53
$16.00 / yearPrices rose on 1 July 2026 and this is not a price-led registrar — .io is $71 a year. It earns its place when domains are administered alongside the rest of an AWS account rather than as a separate vendor. .co.uk and .uk transfers are free and do not extend the term.
Namecheap
$18.48 / yearThe broadest feature set of the mainstream rows here, and no longer a cheap place to hold names: $11.28 for the first year, $18.48 for every year after it. It publishes an explicit DNS availability target, which almost no other retail registrar does.
Name.com
$19.99 / yearBroad API, bulk search, and expiring and premium domain tools. It warns that premium names carry individual pricing, so the standard rate here does not predict what a good name will cost.
IONOS
$20.00 / yearThe clearest demonstration of why the first-year column decides nothing: $1 to register, $20 every year afterwards. What you are buying at that price is 24/7 phone, chat and email support and a named consultant, which is worth real money to a business that will actually pick up the phone.
Squarespace Domains
About $20 / yearWhere Google Domains customers ended up. Do not price it against old Google Domains rates — this is a different tariff on a different platform. Up to 100 email forwards and 400-odd extensions, but no registrar automation platform to speak of.
GoDaddy
$22.99 / yearThe $0.01 first year on .com and .net requires a three-year purchase, and the renewal is the highest of the mainstream retail registrars. It is also the only registrar here that states plainly that there is no outgoing transfer fee, and its auction and bulk ecosystem is the largest of the registrars in this table.
Gandi
$38.38 / yearNearly four times the cheapest row for the same registry service. The platform is not the problem — LiveDNS with DNSSEC, a public API, up to 10,000 forwarding addresses, ISO 27001 and ISO 22301 certification — the commodity gTLD pricing is. US tariff, excluding tax.
Other extensions
Fewer registrars publish readable renewal figures outside .com, so these are shorter tables rather than padded ones. Where a registrar sells an extension without publishing a renewal price, it is left out rather than filled in from its registration price, which is a different number and usually a much smaller one.
.net and .org
| Registrar | .net renewal | .org renewal |
|---|---|---|
| Spaceship | $11.20 | $11.39 |
| Cloudflare Registrar | At cost | At cost |
| Amazon Route 53 | $17.00 | $16.00 |
| Namecheap | $18.58 | $18.98 |
| IONOS | — | $20.00 |
| Squarespace Domains | — | About $20 |
| GoDaddy | $24.99 | $23.99 |
| Gandi | $39.98 | $39.98 |
The ordering is not the same as .com. Spaceship is cheapest on .com and charges more than its own .com price on .net; Gandi's .net and .org are both close to $40. Do not assume a registrar that wins on one extension wins on the rest of your portfolio.
The extensions that actually cost money
A .com is the cheap part of most portfolios. The extensions below are where carrying cost is decided, and the registry sets most of that price rather than the registrar — which is why the spread between registrars narrows sharply here even as the absolute numbers multiply.
| Registrar | .co | .io | .co.uk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spaceship | $31.05 | $51.75 | $5.42 |
| Porkbun | — | $51.80 | — |
| Amazon Route 53 | $38.00 | $71.00 | $9.00 |
| IONOS | $48.00 | — | — |
| GoDaddy | $51.99 | — | $12.99 |
| Gandi | — | — | $31.98 |
A .io costs roughly five times what a .com costs to hold, everywhere, and the cheapest registrar on .com is not dramatically cheaper on it: $51.75 at Spaceship against $51.80 at Porkbun and $71 at AWS. A hundred .io names carry like five hundred .com names. IONOS publishes a .ai renewal of $120 a year, which is the same lesson with another zero on it.
The mirror image is .co.uk, where $5.42 to $12.99 a year makes it one of the cheapest extensions anywhere — except at Gandi, which renews it at $31.98. Cloudflare is absent from this table because it has no retail price to quote: it charges the registry fee on whatever it supports, whatever that fee happens to be.
What else you get
Everything that is not a price. Arranged by capability rather than by registrar, because that is the question people actually arrive with — who has an API, not what does Porkbun have — and because a twelve-by-seven grid of one-word answers is unreadable at any width. The registrar-by-registrar view is Row by row, above.
Read “Not verified” as a question, not as a missing feature. It means we could not confirm the capability from the registrar's own current material. Spaceship appears there 5 times out of 5 and is not a barebones registrar — it simply documents less publicly than Namecheap does, and that difference shows up here long before any difference in the product would.
Whois privacy
Whether your name and address are redacted from the public registration record, and on what terms. Always on eligible extensions only — registry policy blocks privacy outright on some ccTLDs and no registrar can override that.
- Free
- Spaceship · Dynadot · Porkbun · IONOS · GoDaddy
- Redacted
- Cloudflare Registrar
- Included
- OVHcloud · Squarespace Domains
- Not stated
- Amazon Route 53
- Free for life
- Namecheap
- With transfer
- Name.com
- Not published
- Gandi
Domain API
Programmatic registration, renewal, transfer and DNS. It is the difference between managing forty names and managing four hundred, and it is the one capability that is painful to add later by switching registrar.
- Yes
- Dynadot · Porkbun · Namecheap · Name.com · GoDaddy · Gandi
- Limited
- Amazon Route 53
- No
- Squarespace Domains
- Not verified
- Spaceship · Cloudflare Registrar · OVHcloud · IONOS
Bulk tools
Search, register, renew and edit in batches from the dashboard rather than one name at a time. The renewal pass over a portfolio is the week this either exists or does not.
- Yes
- Dynadot · Namecheap · Name.com · GoDaddy
- Limited
- Porkbun · Amazon Route 53 · IONOS
- Not verified
- Spaceship · Cloudflare Registrar · OVHcloud · Squarespace Domains · Gandi
Marketplace or auctions
Buying and selling inside the same account the names are held in, including expired auctions and closeouts. It saves a transfer on every acquisition and every sale.
- Yes
- Dynadot · Porkbun · Namecheap · Name.com · GoDaddy
- Limited
- IONOS
- No
- Cloudflare Registrar · Amazon Route 53 · Squarespace Domains · Gandi
- Not verified
- Spaceship · OVHcloud
Registrar lock
A flag that refuses transfers until you clear it. Standard and worth confirming: it is the cheapest protection a domain has, and it is not registry lock, which is a different and stronger product sold by corporate registrars.
- Yes
- Cloudflare Registrar · Namecheap · Name.com
- Limited
- Squarespace Domains
- Not verified
- Spaceship · Dynadot · Porkbun · OVHcloud · Amazon Route 53 · IONOS · GoDaddy · Gandi
Two-factor authentication
On a portfolio of any value this is the account control worth checking first. A registrar account with a reused password and no second factor is a larger exposure than any price difference on this page.
- Yes
- Cloudflare Registrar · Namecheap · Name.com · GoDaddy
- Limited
- Amazon Route 53
- Not verified
- Spaceship · Dynadot · Porkbun · OVHcloud · IONOS · Squarespace Domains · Gandi
“Limited” means conditional, or available only as part of a wider product rather than as a registrar feature — AWS is the clearest case, where the automation is the whole AWS surface rather than a registrar API and the account limits are not a bulk-registration programme. “No” is the deliberate one: Cloudflare and Squarespace are not trying to be portfolio platforms and have not built the parts that would make them one.
On privacy, Namecheap’s “free for life” is the only wording here that promises it will not later become an upsell. Gandi and AWS are the two that do not state their terms at all, which on a portfolio is worth an email before a transfer rather than after one.
Support and reputation
There is no honest uptime league table for registrars. A registrar runs at least three separate things — the control panel, the provisioning interface, and, if you use it, authoritative DNS — and an uptime guarantee on the third says nothing about the first two. Namecheap is the only retail registrar here that publishes a number at all: a 99.99% target on its standard DNS, and a 100% guarantee on the paid tier. Those are DNS statements, not registrar statements.
So what is left is consumer sentiment, which is a weak signal and worth exactly what it costs. It is ordered by sample size below rather than by score, because that is the first thing to read here:
| Registrar | Trustpilot, out of 5 | Reviews behind it |
|---|---|---|
| GoDaddy | mid-4 | ~141,000 |
| IONOS | 4.6 | ~44,000 |
| Porkbun | 4.8 | ~26,000 |
| Namecheap | 4.2 | ~22,000 |
| OVHcloud | 3.9 | ~8,000 |
| Dynadot | 4.5 | ~5,000 |
| Gandi | 4.5 | ~4,000 |
| Netim | 4.5 | ~3,000 |
| EuroDNS | 3.0 | ~300 |
| Hover | 1.5 | ~118 |
Hover's 1.5 comes from 118 people and GoDaddy's mid-4 from about 141,000. Those are not comparable measurements, and neither is a claim about whether your domains will still resolve next Tuesday.
One security history appears here, and only because the company published it itself. In its SEC filings GoDaddy told investors that incidents found between 2020 and 2022 included compromised hosting credentials, a 2021 breach of its Managed WordPress provisioning system affecting up to 1.2 million active and inactive customers, and malware on cPanel servers in 2022, and concluded they were part of one multi-year campaign.
Two caveats, and they matter as much as the paragraph above. Those were hosting systems rather than the registrar's registry interface, so they are not evidence about the part of GoDaddy that holds a domain. And GoDaddy appears here because it is a listed company that files detailed disclosures, not because it is the only registrar to which anything has happened — several of the others are private, or file under regimes that ask for much less, so the absence of a paragraph is not the absence of an incident.
Before you move
Most of the cost of a bad transfer is not the transfer fee. It is a name that stops resolving, or a lock nobody noticed until renewal week. In the order the checks bite:
-
Check the 60-day lock first
A name registered or transferred within the last 60 days cannot be transferred out. A change to the registrant can trigger a lock of its own, depending on what changed and whether the registrar offers an opt-out. On a large portfolio this usually splits the move into two passes rather than one.
-
Confirm the transfer adds a year
On most gTLDs an inbound transfer extends the registration by a year, which makes it closer to a prepaid renewal than a fee. It is not universal: AWS shows .co.uk and .uk transfers at zero with no change to the term.
-
Time it around the renewal, not after it
A transfer normally adds a year, so it does the job of the next renewal at the new registrar's price instead of the old one's. The trap is the auto-renew grace window: a name auto-renewed at the losing registrar days before a transfer has been paid for at the dearer rate for a year you were about to buy anyway.
-
Check privacy on your actual extensions
“Free privacy” is always “free privacy on eligible extensions”. Registry policy blocks it outright on some ccTLDs, and the eligible set differs between registrars.
-
Separate the registration from the DNS
A transfer moves the registration, not necessarily the zone. Export the records first. Cloudflare is the case where this is not a choice at all — its registrar requires its own nameservers.
-
Ask about the outgoing fee
GoDaddy states plainly that there is none. Most registrars publish nothing either way, which is not the same as free, and it is easier to ask before the auth codes are in hand than after.
-
Price the whole portfolio, not the .com
The cheapest .com is regularly not the cheapest .io, .co or ccTLD. On a mixed portfolio the extension mix decides the bill more than the headline .com rate does.
Not priced here
These registrars sell the same extensions and did not publish a figure we could read. They are listed rather than dropped, because a comparison that quietly omits whatever it could not price reads as complete when it is not.
Hover
A public pricing table exists but its rows did not resolve into readable values. Privacy is free on supported TLDs and the proposition is deliberate simplicity rather than price.
Network Solutions
The price page renders dynamically and the core .com, .net and .org rows did not surface. A published ccTLD example: .uk at $11.75 for the first year and $16.99 to renew.
Domain.com
A large public TLD table exists, but the portion we could read did not include the core gTLD rows. Reported as unknown rather than extrapolated from the extensions that were visible.
Alibaba Cloud
The last explicit official figures — $11.99 to register, $12.59 to renew — come from a price-adjustment notice rather than the live table, and Alibaba's own documentation says the live pricing page is the authoritative one. Indicative, not a quote.
101domain
Its own pricing service reported that it was unavailable when we checked. Worth knowing regardless: an inbound transfer normally means paying the renewal amount and usually adds a year, and private registration is a paid add-on.
Netim
Registration and renewal values were not reliably exposed. Captured transfer examples were roughly $13 for .com, $13.50 for .net and $14 for .org, excluding VAT. It advertises more than 1,300 extensions including over 450 ccTLDs.
EuroDNS
Priced in euros and deliberately not converted: €10.99 for the first .com year, €21 to renew or transfer, €24.50 for .net and €25 for .org. A separate page quotes €5 a year for privacy, but it is older than the pricing pages, so check it at the till.
Register.com
Retail checkout prices were not exposed. Its partner schedule showed .com at $12.53, which is a wholesale figure and is not comparable with anything in the table above.
Three other cases
Three things that turn up in registrar comparisons and do not belong in one, for different reasons.
Wholesale and reseller platforms
Tucows/OpenSRS, Enom, ResellerClubBuilt for hosting companies, agencies and platforms reselling under their own brand, so pricing depends on volume tier and is mostly behind a login. OpenSRS advertises 700+ TLDs, an API, no monthly fee and no minimum purchase. ResellerClub publishes wholesale starting rates — .com from $12.39, .org from $10.29 — which are not retail prices and should not be read as one.
Corporate and brand-protection registrars
CSC, Com Laude/Markmonitor, NameshieldQuote-based, and comparing them against a $10 retail .com misses what is being bought: registry lock, role separation, auditability, brand monitoring, named specialists and escalation paths. CSC says it manages more than two million domains; Nameshield is ISO 27001 certified; Com Laude completed its acquisition of Markmonitor in January 2026. Once a domain carries a brand, an authentication endpoint or an email namespace, a compromise costs more than a decade of registration fees.
Google Domains
DiscontinuedIt no longer operates as a registrar and its customers were migrated to Squarespace Domains. It still appears in comparison tables written before the migration; the prices in those tables are not obtainable anywhere.
Choosing one
Renewal price only decides it when nothing else does. What usually decides it:
| Holding a portfolio cheaply | Spaceship, Dynadot, Porkbun. All three are within about a dollar of each other, and all three are exposed to the November increase. |
|---|---|
| Lowest structural markup | Cloudflare, which takes no margin at all. Only if you are content for the domain to stay on Cloudflare's nameservers for as long as Cloudflare is the registrar. |
| Bulk tools and an aftermarket together | Dynadot or GoDaddy. GoDaddy has the larger auction ecosystem and charges roughly twice as much to hold the names feeding it. |
| Automating against an API | Porkbun, Namecheap, Name.com, Dynadot. Check rate limits and account eligibility before designing anything around one of them. |
| A first domain, no strong preference | Namecheap or Porkbun. Namecheap is the more mature all-rounder and costs materially more to hold; Porkbun's advertised price is the price. |
| Infrastructure already on AWS | Route 53, on operational grounds only. It is not a price-led registrar and does not pretend to be. |
| Many country extensions | 101domain, Netim, Gandi, EuroDNS, OVHcloud. Eligibility rules, trustee services and local-presence charges will matter more than the headline fee. |
| A domain a business depends on | A corporate registrar with registry lock, not a retail one. Once a name carries a brand, a login or an email namespace, the annual fee stops being the risk. |
Method and limits
- Every figure is a standard, non-premium price for one year, taken from the registrar's own published pricing rather than a third-party comparison site. Two promotional first years carry a multi-year condition rather than being available on their own — GoDaddy's $0.01 needs a three-year purchase — and the row note says so where that is the case.
- Prices were checked on . Registrars change them without notice, and the .com wholesale increase on 1 November 2026 will move several of these rows. Confirm the price at checkout.
- US dollars unless stated. EuroDNS stays in euros deliberately: converting it would add an exchange rate that has nothing to do with the registrar, and would be wrong by the time you read it.
- Premium names are not covered. A registry-reserved or premium domain can cost many times the standard rate, and several registrars say so explicitly.
- “Privacy included” means included on eligible extensions. Registry policy blocks privacy services on some ccTLDs, and no registrar can override that.
- An inbound transfer usually adds a year to the registration, so it is closer to a prepaid renewal than a fee — but not on every extension. AWS shows .co.uk and .uk transfers at zero with no change to the term.
- ccTLDs do not behave like .com on any of these columns: different registry fees, no ICANN transaction fee in many cases, and their own eligibility rules.
- A registrar's DNS uptime claim is not a claim about its control panel or its provisioning interface. Those are three separate systems and almost nobody publishes numbers for the second two.
- This is not every registrar. It covers the retail and developer-facing ones a domain investor is realistically choosing between, plus the segments above that get compared against them by mistake.
Related
- Cutting a portfolio down to the names worth renewing Guide
- Price a whole renewal list at once Tool
- Recommended domain tools Everything else we link to
- Affiliate disclosure How this is funded