Domain Carrying Cost Calculator

This calculator answers one narrow question: what has this domain cost you so far, and what will it cost if you keep paying? You enter the acquisition price, the extension, the annual renewal you actually pay, the number of years you have held it, and any privacy fee your registrar charges. It returns the sunk cost to date and the projected position at five and ten years.

That is a bookkeeping exercise, not a valuation. It is worth doing anyway, because carrying cost is the one number in domain investing that is completely knowable in advance and almost never tracked. Most owners can tell you what they paid for a name. Very few can tell you what the name has cost them since.

What the total is actually made of

A domain registration is a renewable term contract, not a purchase. The retail price you pay stacks in layers: the registry's wholesale fee, the registrar's markup on top of it, the ICANN transaction fee on gTLDs, and optional WHOIS privacy. Only the middle layer is a market price. The rest is set by contract and moves whether or not you are paying attention.

For .com, the wholesale registry fee stood at $10.26 per year, and Verisign announced on 23 April 2026 that it would rise to $10.97 effective 1 November 2026 — a 7% increase, as reported by Domain Name Wire. That is not a one-off. Under its registry agreement with ICANN and its cooperative agreement with the NTIA, Verisign may raise prices by up to 7% in each of the last four years of its six-year contract periods. Domain Name Wire's projection, which is explicitly a projection rather than an announcement, is that the wholesale price reaches $13.42 by the end of the current cycle if every permitted increase is taken.

The ICANN transaction fee is $0.20 per domain-year, effective 1 July 2025, raised from $0.18 — the first increase in over a decade. It applies to each add, renewal or transfer of a gTLD. Country-code extensions such as .co and .ai do not pay it. Some registrars show it as a line item; others bake it into the headline number.

Why extensions diverge so sharply

Retail renewals vary enormously by extension. On Porkbun's published list, checked in August 2026, .com renewed at $11.08, .net at $12.52, .org at $11.84, .xyz at $12.98, .co at $31.20, .io at $51.80 and .ai at $82.70. Porkbun sits at the cheap end of the market, so treat those as a floor rather than an average — retail renewals at GoDaddy, Network Solutions and Register.com run materially higher.

.ai deserves separate attention. Domain Name Wire reported in February 2026 that the registry raised the wholesale price from $70 to $80 per year effective 5 March 2026, and .ai carries a mandatory two-year minimum registration term. So the wholesale cost per renewal event moved from $140 to $160, and you cannot renew in single years to test the water. A .ai costs roughly seven to eight times what a .com costs to carry, which means it has to be worth roughly seven to eight times as much before the hold is rational.

.io carries a different kind of cost that no calculator can price. It is the country-code extension of the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose sovereignty the UK agreed to transfer to Mauritius. ICANN's own position is that "it is not a foregone conclusion that a change in sovereignty will result in a change to the .io domain," and that if the ISO 3166-1 code were ever removed, a five-year phase-out window would commence, extendable in some circumstances. .io is not disappearing. But a ten-year hold on a $51.80-per-year name carries a policy exposure that a .com does not, and the calculator's ten-year figure quietly assumes nothing changes.

Privacy, and the cost you should not be paying

WHOIS privacy is included free at Spaceship, Cloudflare, Porkbun, Dynadot, Namecheap, NameSilo and Squarespace. It is charged at GoDaddy ($9.99/year), Network Solutions ($12.99/year) and Register.com ($9.99/year), per a 2026 comparison of registrar privacy policies. If the privacy field in this calculator is not zero, that is usually a reason to transfer rather than a reason to budget. There is a second cost too, and it does not appear in any ledger: privacy hides your contact details from buyers as well as from spammers. On a held domain with no landing page, WHOIS may be the only inbound channel there is.

How renewal cost compounds across a portfolio

One domain's renewal is trivial. A portfolio's is not, and the compounding is what catches people out. At the Porkbun floor, a thousand-name .com portfolio costs $11,080 a year to carry before anything else happens. Each 7% step in the wholesale fee adds roughly $710 a year to that portfolio's cost base before any registrar markup. Nothing about that increase depends on the aftermarket, on your sell-through rate, or on how good the names are. The floor ratchets upward on a contracted schedule.

Run the calculator on your worst ten names rather than your best one. The result is usually more instructive.

What this calculator does not tell you

It does not tell you whether the domain is any good. That is the whole limitation, and it is worth stating bluntly, because the most common misuse of a carrying-cost figure is to treat it as a price floor. It is not one. Buyers do not care what you have spent, and cumulative renewals are sunk cost — the money is gone whether you renew again or not. The only live question is whether the next renewal is a good bet.

Several other things sit outside the model. It uses the renewal figure you enter and holds it constant, so a .com projection is optimistic by design given the contracted increase schedule. It does not price the opportunity cost of the capital tied up in the acquisition, which the profitability models discussed on the break-even page do handle. It ignores registrar promotions, multi-year prepayment, transfer-in discounts, currency movement and tax treatment. And it says nothing about the invisible cost of holding a domain with no landing page and no listing, where the annual outlay buys you no inbound channel at all.

Frequently asked questions