How to find expiring domains worth registering
Every day around 100,000 .com domains reach the end of their life. Almost all are junk; a few are short, real-word names that anyone can register at the normal price. Here is where to find them and how to spot them.
Where expiring domains come from
A .com that is not renewed passes through a grace period, a 30-day redemption period and five days of pending delete, and is then released in the registry’s daily drop. Because the last stage always lasts the same time, the names released on any day are known about a week ahead. Lists of them — “drop lists” or “pending delete lists” — are compiled every day, and Domains Open scores the whole .com list: around 100,000 names a day. How the timeline works.
Two places to look
- Names about to be released. These come out in the daily drop at 12:00 UTC, and anyone can register them at the normal price. Most are never contested: studies of .com deletions found only about one in ten deleted names is registered again, nearly all of those on the day it is released. Upcoming releases · Released and still free.
- Expired names still at the registrar. Some registrars auction expired names before they are deleted — GoDaddy lists them about 26 days after expiry. A name sold there goes to the buyer and never reaches the drop, and it costs whatever the auction reaches.
How to tell a good one from the rest
Nearly everything on a drop list is junk: typos, strings of letters and numbers, names tied to one long-gone event. The good ones share a few traits:
- Easy to say and spell. Hear it once, type it right. No hyphens, no numbers.
- Short. Fewer letters, fewer typos.
- Real words, or a made-up word that sounds like one.
- A clean past. Check its history before you register it.
- Nobody’s trademark.
That is what our score measures, out of 100: length, real words, how the name sounds, its word structure and how it would work as a brand. It measures the name, not a price. Every day we also check the best-scoring names of that day’s drop with the registry and publish what happened to them in our drop reports. More on what makes a good name.
Check it is really free
Ask the registry, not DNS: a name stops resolving weeks before anyone else can register it. Check any .com — we ask Verisign’s registry directly.
What happens at a real drop
In the Nov 14, 2026 drop, 116 of the 400 best-scoring names were registered the same day. The first went at 12:00 UTC, and half of those by 12:28 UTC. The other side of it: 279 (70%) were still unregistered that evening, free for anyone at the normal price. See every daily report.
Then register it yourself
When a name you want is released, register it at any registrar at the normal price. Step by step. Or watch it on Domains Open and we alert you the moment it opens. We never buy or bid on anything.
Related
Do you need a backorder? · Check a domain’s history · Names by industry