The Domain Drop Cycle — Expiry Timeline & Backordering

The Drop Cycle, End to End

The expanded version of the drops section of Domains 101, which is the single most-linked thing we've ever written and deserved room of its own. This page is about .com and the big gTLDs. ccTLDs are all different — .uk drops fast, .de has its own grace logic, .cy (our home turf) goes its own way entirely. Always check the registry's rules before you plan around one.

The timeline, in table form

Stage	Day range	What happens	What you can do
Expiry	day 0	The domain's registration lapses. Service usually keeps working during grace.	Owner: renew, nothing happened, carry on.
Auto-renew grace	0 to +45	Renewal at the normal price. Site and email keep working for most registrars.	Owner: renew, ideally before day 40 or so — don't live on the edge.
Redemption grace	+45 to +75	Domain goes into `redemptionPeriod`. Locked at the registry. Restoring it costs the owner a redemption fee, commonly $80–150 on top of renewal.	Owner: still recoverable. Watcher: nothing yet, it's not droppable. Read the status codes before panicking.
Pending delete	+75 to +80	Status `pendingDelete`. Exactly 5 days, locked, nothing anyone can do — not the owner, not the registrar, not us.	Watcher: place backorders. This is the last window before the catch.
Drop	~+80	The domain is released to the world. For .com, roughly 2pm ET.	Drop-catchers race. Winner gets it, everyone else gets an email of condolence.

Some registrars add their own internal stages (an "expired-hold" status before the registry sees anything), which shifts the whole calendar by a few days either way. The registry clock is the one that counts, and it's the one in the WHOIS record.

Backordering notes, from twelve years of watching

Backorder at more than one service. They compete at the moment of release; the winner usually has the best technical position, not the best price for you. Our advice hasn't changed since 2013: if you actually want the name, cover two or three services.
Set a ceiling before the adrenaline starts. Some catchers run the caught domain to auction between everyone who pre-ordered it. Decide your max price at a calm moment, write it down, and obey it. The auction interface is designed by people who know this.
Private auctions beat public ones. If only the pre-orderers bid, prices stay sane; the moment a catch goes to a public marketplace, everyone with a watchlist piles in. Which service does which changes over the years — current notes in the directory.
Check the name's history before you commit. A dropped domain inherits whatever the previous owner did with it — spam blocklists, search-engine grudges, a 2009 pill shop. See the WHOIS history section of the tools page.
Most drops are not worth catching. Roughly 40,000 .com names drop on a normal day. The good ones are rare, the OK ones are a niche, and the rest are the same five dictionary words someone registered in a burst of optimism in 2006.

The email we get every month

"My domain dropped and someone grabbed it, help!" — and about half the time, the domain was in redemption, not dropped, and the owner could have saved it for the fee. If you are reading this page because that just happened to you: check the status code first. If it says redemptionPeriod, call your registrar today, not next week. If it says pendingDelete, we're sorry — that one's gone, and this page is now reconnaissance for the backorder.

Monthly-ish catch-count numbers run in the news headlines when we remember to compile them, which lately is most months.

The Short Version

0 : expires
+45 : redemption starts
+75 : pending delete
+80 : drops (~2pm ET)

WAP Domains

The Drop Cycle, End to End

The timeline, in table form

Backordering notes, from twelve years of watching

The email we get every month

Sponsor

The Short Version

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