What a domain name costs per year
A domain is billed annually and the price depends mostly on the extension. As a rough guide for 2026: a .com runs about $10–20 a year, a .co.uk about £8–15, a .org around $12–20. Trendy extensions (.agency, .studio, .online) start cheap and renew expensive, sometimes above $35.
Part of that price is fixed no matter who sells it to you: generic extensions carry an ICANN fee of about $0.18 per domain per year. The rest is the registrar’s margin, which is why the same .com can be $9 in one place and $25 in another with no technical difference whatsoever.
Domains have no quality tiers. A $9 .com and a $25 .com behave identically. What changes is the renewal price, what you get charged for on top, and how easy they make it to leave.
The first-year trap
This is the one that costs people the most. Most headline offers cover the first year only: $0.99, £1, sometimes free. Renewal goes back to list price, which can be ten times higher.
Always do the two-year maths. A domain at $0.99 that renews at $22 costs $23 over two years; a flat $12 one costs $24 — but the flat one has no surprise in year three, and by year five the "cheap" one is well ahead on price.
Before you register, look up the renewal price, not the sign-up price. If it is not on the product page and you have to dig into a pricing table, that is the reason it is buried.
Domain, hosting, email and website are four different bills
This is where budgets fall apart. The domain is just the name — the address where people find you. With a domain and nothing else, anyone typing your name sees nothing at all.
You are usually paying for three or four separate things: the domain (the address), the hosting (where the site lives), email on your own name (hello@yourbusiness.com) and the website itself. Each has its own renewal, and together they are the real cost of being online.
When you get a quote for a website, ask which of those are inside the price and which get billed separately. We break the same question down in our guide to what sits behind a cheap website price.
The add-ons that get charged separately
WHOIS privacy. Some registrars include it free; others charge $8–15 a year to hide your name and address from the public directory. If you register as a company, the address is your business address anyway — check whether you actually need to pay for this.
The SSL certificate (the padlock). Free certificates have been the standard for years and every serious host issues them automatically. Being charged $60 a year for a basic certificate is an avoidable bill.
"Renewal protection", bundled email and site builders. These are usually pre-ticked in the basket. None of them is required for the domain to work.
Why the domain you want costs $3,000
If your search returns a four-figure price, that domain is not available — it is on the resale market. Someone registered it first, sometimes to use and sometimes to flip, and they set the price. There is no tariff there, only negotiation.
You have three sensible exits: change the extension (the .co.uk of your name is often free when the .com is not), add your town or trade to the name, or pick a different name. Paying $3,000 only makes sense when the name is the business.
The ugly variant is different: if someone registered your registered trademark in order to resell it to you, that is cybersquatting, and the route is a UDRP complaint rather than a cheque.
Whose name is on it — the part that actually costs money
The domain costs $12. Losing it costs far more. If the person building your site registers it in their own name rather than yours, the address is not yours: the day you part ways you start again on a new domain, with your search rankings back at zero.
It takes a minute to check. Ask to see the domain inside an account that belongs to you, with your email as the registrant contact. "I hold it in my account, don’t worry about it" is not the same as being the registrant.
Also mind the calendar: after you register a domain, or after the registrant is changed, ICANN rules impose a 60-day transfer lock during which it cannot be moved to another provider. Nobody is being difficult; it is worth knowing before you are in a hurry.
For the record, this is how we work: the domain is registered in the client’s name from day one and ends up in the client’s own account, with their credentials, at handover. That is what makes leaving cost nothing.
.com, .co.uk or .us?
.co.uk is run by Nominet and has no residency requirement, although a UK address on the record is what customers expect to see. For a business trading in Britain it reads as local, and it is often free when the .com is gone.
.us is different: it requires a genuine US nexus — you must be a US citizen, resident, or an organisation with a real presence in the United States. Registrars do verify, and domains get cancelled over it.
.com is still what people type from habit, and the one to hold if you might sell abroad. If your business name is your brand, register the two that matter and redirect one to the other. That is roughly $25 a year and it removes the risk of someone else taking the pair.
A domain is not a trademark
Registering a domain gives you no rights over the name itself. They are two separate registers: the domain comes from a registrar, the trademark from the USPTO in the United States or the IPO in the United Kingdom. Before you paint the name on a van, check there is no identical registered mark in your sector.
It also works the other way. Holding a registered trademark is what gives you a case if someone takes the matching domain in bad faith — without it, you are just another bidder.
If you handle customer data through a form on that domain, the rules that follow are the UK GDPR or, for California customers, the CCPA. The domain does not solve any of that on its own.
What the domain costs inside a finished website
In our website packages the domain is bought at the start, in the client’s name, and the site lives on it from day one. The package price is published and the domain is passed through at registrar cost with no markup: it is not a line item that inflates a quote, it is an annual fee that belongs to you.
That matters more than average when the name carries the business — a real estate agency or an architecture studio, where the address is part of the brand. The expensive mistake is never the $12; it is not being the registrant.
Related guides by trade