Domain names registered worldwide

411.6 million

Verisign counted 411.6 million on September 30, 2026.

100 million200 million300 million400 millionFirst .com, 1985

September 30, 2026411.6 million

Source: Verisign, The Domain Name Industry Brief, Q3 2026

Registered domain names at each date. 1989 to 1997: domains found in DNS surveys (Hobbes' Internet Timeline), not registry counts. From the end of 2003: Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief, across all top-level domains. No worldwide count exists for 1997 to 2003, so it is left as a gap. Marked points are where Verisign changed what it counts.

Source: Verisign, The Domain Name Industry Brief, Q3 2026 (published October 22, 2026): 411.6 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains on September 30, 2026. Country-code domains are estimated by ZookNIC, and Verisign leaves out .tk, .cf, .ga, .gq and .ml. Between reports we add 1.05 registrations a second, the average net growth over the four quarters to September 30, 2026 (33.0 million in 365 days). Tested on 25 past quarters, this method was off by 2.5 million on average by the end of a quarter. The next report replaces the estimate.

What counts as a registered domain

A domain name is registered while someone holds it at a registry, such as acme.com or acme.de. Each figure here counts the names held on one day. A name that lapses and is deleted drops out of the count, and it may be registered again later by someone else.

Where the numbers come from

From the end of 2003, every figure is from Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief, a quarterly count across all top-level domains. Generic domains are counted from zone files and registry data, and country-code domains are estimated by ZookNIC. The figures for 1989 to 1997 come from DNS surveys, which counted the domains they found, not a registry's list.

The series as JSON, with a source for every figure

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