How Many Domains Are There? The 2026 Numbers

There were 401.6 million domain names registered across every extension on the internet at the end of June 2026. That is the short answer, and it is out of date by the time you read it: the total moves by roughly a hundred thousand a day. The longer answer is the more useful one, because three different organisations count three different things, and most articles answering this question are quoting a figure that was already a year old when they published it.

The short answer, with the working shown

Here is every headline number in one place, each with the body that publishes it. Everything further down this page is one of these figures taken apart.

A few things fall straight out of that table. There is roughly one registered domain for every twenty people alive. The single extension .com accounts for 41.5 per cent of every domain on the internet. And around 96 million registered domains, close to a quarter of the total, do not answer a web request at all.

Where the 401.6 million figure comes from

Almost every credible answer to this question traces back to one document: the Domain Name Industry Brief, published quarterly by Verisign, the company that operates the .com and .net registries. The Q2 2026 brief is the current one, and it reports 401.6 million registrations across all top-level domains as at 30 June 2026.

That was an increase of 9.1 million on the previous quarter, or 2.3 per cent, and 29.9 million year on year, which is growth of 8.1 per cent. Both are unusually strong. The quarterly gain works out at almost exactly 100,000 net new domains a day, every day, for ninety-one days.

Verisign counts what registries report to it. For .com and .net it is counting its own register, so those numbers are exact. For everybody else it is aggregating what other registries publish, which is where the caveats begin.

Why the number is always behind

Three separate lags stack up. Registries publish on their own schedules, usually monthly. Verisign compiles and publishes three to four weeks after the quarter ends. And the country-code figures are compiled from third-party data rather than counted directly by Verisign, which is why they get revised in later editions of the brief.

So the freshest public figure available on any given day describes a register that has already moved on by somewhere between six and sixteen weeks. At a hundred thousand a day, sixteen weeks is eleven million domains. That is the honest error bar on any answer to this question, including this one.

Why other sources quote different numbers

If you search this question you will get answers ranging from 350 million to over 600 million. They are not all wrong. They are counting different things:

• Registered domains is the 401.6 million figure. A name someone has paid for, whether or not anything is running on it.
• Resolving domains is smaller. Registered but with no nameservers set, or nameservers that answer nothing, is a common state.
• Domains with a website is smaller again, and is the 305.3 million Netcraft number below.
• Hostnames is far larger, because every subdomain counts. This is where the billion-plus figures come from, and they are answering a different question.
• Last year's number accounts for most of the rest. A great many pages titled "domain statistics 2026" are quoting the Q4 2024 brief.

How many domain extensions are there?

1,438, as at 13 August 2026. Unlike the registration count, this one you can verify yourself in a second, because IANA publishes the authoritative list of every delegated top-level domain as a plain text file and updates it daily:

curl -s https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt | grep -vc '^#'

The same list is browsable as the IANA Root Zone Database. Today it breaks down like this:

The internationalised ones are stored in the root in an ASCII form beginning xn--, which is why a raw count of the file shows them as strings like XN--P1AI rather than as рф. Each of them is also either a country code or a generic in its own right, so counting them as their own row, as the table above does, is a choice rather than a fact.

You will also see 1,591 quoted, or 1,249, or 316 country codes. Those are not errors so much as different snapshots and different rules about what counts. Some sources include extensions that have been applied for but not delegated, some include ones that have since been retired, and some count internationalised country codes separately from their Latin equivalents, so рф and .ru appear as two. The IANA file is the only count with no interpretation in it, which is why it is the one worth using.

How many .com domains are there?

166.6 million. Together with .net, at 12.5 million, that is 179.1 million domains, or 44.6 per cent of every registered domain on the internet sitting in two registries run by one company.

The pair grew by 8.6 million year on year, up 5.1 per cent. Notably, 12.7 million brand new .com and .net domains were registered during the second quarter of 2026 alone, against 10.4 million in the same quarter of 2025. That is roughly 140,000 new registrations a day in those two extensions, before you count anything else, and before you subtract everything that expired in the same period.

The gap between those two numbers matters. Gross new registrations run far ahead of net growth because a large share of domains registered in any quarter are gone within a year or two. Verisign publishes renewal rate estimates for the ten largest extensions, and in the most recent quarter they ranged from 81.6 per cent for .uk down to 17.5 per cent for .xyz. In other words, more than four in five .xyz domains registered a year ago were not renewed.

How many country-code domains are there?

148.6 million, which is 37 per cent of the total. That grew by 2.3 million over the quarter and 5.2 million year on year, so country codes are growing, but noticeably slower than the internet as a whole.

The ten largest country codes as at 30 June 2026, in order, were .cn (China), .de (Germany), .uk (United Kingdom), .ru (Russia), .nl (Netherlands), .br (Brazil), .fr (France), .au (Australia), .in (India) and .eu (the European Union). Six of the ten largest extensions of any kind are country codes.

Two things about that list are worth knowing if you are choosing a domain. First, size does not mean openness: several country codes restrict registration to residents or registered companies, and a few that appear in global rankings, such as .io and .co, are used almost entirely outside the territory they nominally belong to. Second, country codes are not covered by ICANN's registrar rules. Transfer procedures, dispute resolution and what happens when you forget to renew are set by each national registry, and they vary enormously. The Nominet rules for a .uk domain are not the rules for a .de.

How many of those domains have a website on them?

Fewer than you would think. Netcraft's July 2026 survey found 1,494,915,628 websites, but those sat across only 305,348,459 domains.

Against 401.6 million registered, that leaves roughly 96 million domains, close to a quarter of the total, that do not answer a web request at all. They are held for a brand, parked for resale, bought for an email address, defensively registered to stop somebody else having them, or simply forgotten and on auto-renew.

The two surveys do not use identical definitions and Netcraft's crawl will not reach everything, so treat that quarter as an approximation rather than a precise share. The direction is not in doubt, though. A registered domain and a working website are very different things, and the gap between the two numbers is about the size of the entire country-code namespace twice over.

The 1.49 billion websites figure works the other way, and this is the source of most of the confusion about "how many websites are there". It counts hostnames responding to a request, so a hosting company with a million parked customer accounts contributes a million sites. The count of domains, not sites, is the honest measure of how much of the web is actually distinct.

How many domains are registered every day?

Around 100,000 net, based on the most recent quarter's growth. Gross registrations are far higher: .com and .net alone took roughly 140,000 new registrations a day, and independent trackers monitoring newly registered domains across the generic extensions typically log between 250,000 and 340,000 a day.

The difference between gross and net is deletions, and the churn is enormous. Every day tens of thousands of domains reach the end of a redemption period and drop back into the pool. This is an entire small industry: backorder services, drop-catch registrars competing to grab a name in the millisecond it becomes available, and an aftermarket where the good ones are resold.

For an ordinary site owner the practical consequence is simple and unforgiving. A domain you let lapse is not quietly waiting for you. For a generic extension it goes through a grace period that varies by registrar, then a 30-day redemption period that costs far more to recover from than a renewal ever would, then five days pending deletion, and for anything with traffic or backlinks it will very likely be caught within seconds of dropping. Country codes run their own timetables, some of them shorter. We have picked up the pieces after this more than once, and the honest answer is usually that the name is gone.

Who holds all these domains?

Registries operate the extensions. Registrars sell the names. ICANN lists roughly 3,000 active registrar accreditations, which sounds like a competitive market until you notice they resolve to fewer than 500 distinct brands. One company routinely holds dozens of accreditation IDs, and the distribution of actual domains is more lopsided still.

GoDaddy reported 82.0 million domains under management in its second quarter of 2026. That is one domain in five on the entire internet, held by one company. Add the next few, principally GMO Internet in Japan, Tucows, Namecheap, Squarespace and Newfold Digital, and a clear majority of the world's domains sit with a handful of businesses.

That concentration is the same pattern we wrote about in our hosting comparison, and it has the same consequences: renewal pricing that bears no relation to the introductory price, upsells stacked into the control panel, and support that gets thinner after each acquisition. A domain is a low-margin product used to sell higher-margin ones, which is why registrars would much rather sell you hosting, email and an SSL certificate you can get free.

Are there any good domains left?

The namespace is not close to full, in the arithmetic sense. A .com label can be up to 63 characters drawn from 37 possibilities, which gives a total number of possible .com names with 99 digits in it. There will never be a shortage of strings.

Short, meaningful strings are a different matter, and there the picture is bleak:

• Every two-letter and three-letter .com is registered and has been for many years.
• All 456,976 four-letter .com domains are gone. That is 26 letters to the power of four, every possible combination, and the last one went in 2013.
• Every five-letter dictionary word is taken. Of the 11,881,376 possible five-letter strings, plenty remain, but they are the ones that do not mean anything.
• One-word .com domains sell in the aftermarket, usually for five or six figures.

This is exactly the pressure the 1,000-odd newer generic extensions were meant to relieve, and to a degree they have. .xyz, .top, .shop, .online and .site each run into the millions. Whether a customer trusts one is a separate question, and the low renewal rates above suggest the buyers themselves are not committed. In practice, if the .com is gone, a longer .com or your national extension will usually serve you better than a short name on a novelty extension.

What happens next

The number of extensions is about to move for the first time in a decade. ICANN's application window for new generic top-level domains, the first since 2012, closed on 12 August 2026. ICANN has not yet published how many applications it received; the figure is expected with the 2026 round statistics.

For scale, the 2012 round drew 1,930 applications and eventually put more than 1,200 new extensions into the root. Evaluation, objections and contention resolution took years, and delegations from this round are not expected to start appearing until 2027 at the earliest.

The other thing to watch is how much of that expansion turns out to be brand extensions rather than public ones. Plenty of the 2012 round became .brand namespaces that nobody outside the company can register in, and several were handed back unused. A rising extension count does not necessarily mean more names available to you.

What the numbers mean for your own domain

Four hundred million registrations, a fifth of them with one registrar, a quarter of them pointing at nothing, and a hundred thousand a day expiring into a market that catches the good ones instantly. Set against that, the things worth doing with your own domain are unglamorous and take about ten minutes:

• Check who the registrant actually is. The single most common domain emergency we handle is a business that does not own its own name, because a former developer or a long-gone marketing agency registered it in their own account. Look it up before you need to.
• Check the renewal price, not the price you paid. First-year domain pricing is promotional almost everywhere.
• Put a real address on the account. Renewal reminders and transfer approvals go to the registrant email. If that address belongs to somebody who left, you will find out at the worst possible moment.
• Keep the domain and the hosting separate. It costs nothing and it means a dispute with a host never becomes a dispute over your name.
• Know where your nameservers point. If you cannot answer that, neither can anybody you call in an emergency.

If any of that turned up something you did not expect, that is the normal outcome. Untangling ownership, moving a domain away from a registrar who will not cooperate, and repointing DNS without dropping email is a routine part of our migration work, and it is included in ongoing maintenance rather than billed as a project. If a site is down right now because of a domain or DNS problem, that is the emergency line.

The short version

• 401.6 million domains are registered across every extension, as at 30 June 2026, growing by roughly 100,000 a day.
• 1,438 extensions are live in the root zone today: 1,038 generic, 248 country codes, 151 internationalised and .arpa.
• .com is 166.6 million of that, or 41.5 per cent. With .net it is nearly 45 per cent of the internet in two registries.
• Country codes are 148.6 million, 37 per cent, led by .cn, .de and .uk.
• Around a quarter serve no website at all, on the gap between the registration count and Netcraft's 305.3 million responding domains.
• One registrar holds a fifth of them. GoDaddy reported 82.0 million domains under management in the same quarter.
• Every published total is stale by six to sixteen weeks, which is worth ten million domains or so. Treat any figure quoted to three decimal places with suspicion, including the ones here.

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