Also called .com · dot com
.com domain, explained
Verisign runs .com under a registry agreement with ICANN that caps the wholesale price, at US$10.26 a year until November 1, 2026 and US$10.97 after the 7% increase announced for that date, and allows increases of up to 7% in four of every six pricing years. Every registrar pays the same wholesale price, and every .com, from a one-word name to a random string, renews at that rate: .com has no registry premium tiers. At the end of June 2026 it held 166.6 million registrations, against 12.5 million for .net.
That depth makes .com the most liquid extension. According to the Global Domain Report 2026, 66% of Sedo's 2025 sales were .com, and .com accounted for $70 million of the $102.5 million in domain transactions Escrow.com handled in Q4 2025. The largest reported sales are .com names, led by AI.com, reported in February 2026 at $70 million, and Voice.com at $30 million in 2019.
The extension alone does not make a name valuable. Almost every short, one-word and common two-word .com is already registered, so good ones are bought from owners or at expiry auctions. Hand-registering long or awkward .com names on the theory that any .com will sell is the classic beginner mistake; meaning, length and the pool of likely buyers matter more than the extension.
The growth of .ai, which passed one million registrations in January 2026, creates .com buyers as well as competition: a startup that launches on a .ai name is a natural buyer for the matching .com once it raises money.
Example. An investor weighing the same word in .com and in a newer extension expects the .com to draw more inquiries and higher offers, because buyers default to typing .com.
Go deeper The Types of Domain Names That Sell
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- ICANN — .com Registry Agreement, Section 7.3 pricing (Dec 1, 2024)
- DNIB.com (Verisign) — Domain Name Industry Brief Q2 2026 (July 23, 2026)
- InterNetX and Sedo — Global Domain Report 2026, data for 2025
- Escrow.com — Domain Investment Index Q4 2025 (Mar 4, 2026)
- TechCrunch — Crypto.com places $70M bet on AI.com domain (Feb 8, 2026)
- Domain Name Wire — Voice.com is the most expensive publicly announced domain sale (June 20, 2019)
- Domain Name Wire — .ai namespace hits 1 million domain names (Jan 28, 2026)
- Domain Name Wire — Verisign raising wholesale .com prices (Apr 23, 2026)
Education, not financial, legal or tax advice. Domain investing is speculative and most domain names never sell. Read the disclaimer.