How much is my domain name worth?

The short answer

A domain is worth what a buyer will pay for it, and for the overwhelming majority of domains that figure is somewhere between nothing and the cost of the renewal. If you want a real number rather than a flattering one, look up what comparable names have actually sold for on NameBio, take the median of the closest twenty results rather than the highest, and subtract the commission you will pay to sell it. That is your value. An automated appraisal is not.

Three things follow from that. Age does not add value — a domain parked and unused for ten years has ten years of cost and no accumulated asset. The headline sales you have read about are the extreme tail of a very skewed distribution, not the market. And a name only had to be worth holding if it can plausibly clear its own carrying cost multiplied by the odds of ever selling, which at realistic sell-through rates means four figures for a $11-a-year .com. The rest of this guide is how to work each of those out for your own name.

What actually drives a domain's value

Practitioners disagree about a great deal, but not about the drivers. In rough order of weight:

• Length. Shorter is scarcer and therefore dearer. One word beats two; two beat three.
• Extension. .com dominates and everything else trades at a discount to it. Of the top ten reported sales of 2026, nine are .com and one is .ai (DNJournal).
• Commercial meaning of the words. What the term is worth in advertising terms — how many people search it and what an advertiser pays for a click on it. This is the core of the Rosener Equation below.
• Identifiable end-user demand. Can you name the type of business that needs this exact name, and explain why it would pay four figures? If you cannot articulate the buyer, there probably is not one.
• Comparable sales. Not a driver so much as the evidence for all of the above.

Two things that are commonly believed to drive value and do not. Age on its own does not. Registration date is not a value input in the aftermarket; what buyers occasionally pay for is accumulated search history and backlinks, which require the domain to have actually been used. And what you have spent does not. Cumulative renewals are a sunk cost; buyers do not care, and it is not a price floor.

How to check comparable sales yourself

This is the single most useful skill in domain valuation and it takes about twenty minutes to learn.

1. Start at NameBio. It holds a searchable database of historical reported sales and is what practitioners actually use. Search the main keyword in your domain.
2. Filter to like for like. Same extension, similar length, similar word count. A .com comp does not price a .net, and a one-word sale does not price a three-word name.
3. Read at least twenty results and take the middle, not the top. Every seller instinctively anchors on the highest number on the page. The highest number is the outlier that got reported precisely because it was unusual.
4. Check DNJournal for context at the upper end. It is the industry's system of record for reported sales, publishes weekly and year-to-date charts, and converts foreign currency at the rate in effect when the sale was reported.
5. Subtract the cost of selling. A $3,000 comparable is not $3,000 in your pocket — marketplace commissions in 2026 run from 4% to 30% depending on platform and nameserver configuration.

One structural caveat that matters more than any single number: both databases record reported sales. A large share of private transactions never appear anywhere. That biases the visible record toward the larger, more newsworthy end of the market, which means comps read from the top of a search result page overstate what a typical name fetches.

Why automated appraisals mislead

Automated valuation tools give you a number in one second, which is exactly why people trust them and exactly why the number is dangerous. The documented criticism here is specific, recent and worth attributing precisely: it is about GoDaddy's appraisal tool, examined by Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire in May 2026.

His findings, with his own examples:

• The tool uses “a very old model with outdated data.”
• GoDaddy does not use its own appraisals to price its own portfolio, and prices many of its domains substantially higher.
• MakeMatter.com appraised at $2,615 and sold for $15,000; PressBridge.com appraised at $4,405 and sold for $5,000.
• expedite.io appraised at $5,316 and sold for $14,995; kickers.ai appraised at $171 and sold for $8,000.
• WaterFilters.com was valued at $18,332 while listed for $3.5 million.

What Allemann concedes it does well is the useful part: the tool “stack ranked” comparison domains correctly, making it genuinely helpful “for making a crude first cut at ordering a list.” That is the right use. Rank a portfolio with it; never price a single name with it.

Be careful how far you generalise this. Similar complaints circulate about other automated tools, but I have not seen an equivalently evidenced published critique of any of them — the thoroughly documented case is GoDaddy's. Treat all automated appraisals as ranking devices by default, and be sceptical of anyone quoting one at you as a price, in either direction.

The Rosener Equation, and where it misses

The best-known attempt to put arithmetic behind a domain's value is the Rosener Equation, created by Andrew Rosener of Media Options and presented in a DomainSherpa interview recorded in May 2011. As published it is:

Domain Name Valuation = A × B × C × D, where A is exact-match monthly search volume, B is average cost-per-click, C is the click-through rate for the top organic position (0.35 in the original) and D is a payback period in months (12 in the original).

The logic is intuitive: the name is worth roughly one year of the traffic you would get by ranking first organically for its exact term, valued at what buying that traffic would cost.

Report the results honestly, because they are mixed. On DomainName.com the equation produced $1,238,361 against an actual May 2011 sale of $1,000,000 — close. On RunningShoes.com it produced $378,609 against an actual March 2011 sale of $700,000 — off by nearly half, in the opposite direction. DomainSherpa's own editorial note says the equation “was valid at the time of recording but has been updated over time,” and there is documented disagreement about applying it at all.

Where it is useful: premium generic keyword .com names with measurable search volume and reliable CPC data. Where it is not: brandables, invented words, acronyms, and alternative extensions — it says nothing useful about any of them. And its two inputs are considerably harder to obtain in 2026 than they were in 2011, since exact-match volume and dependable CPC figures are no longer freely published the way they once were.

The headline sales are not the market

Every valuation conversation is distorted by the numbers people have read. Here is the top of DNJournal's 2026 year-to-date chart, through 19 July 2026:

These are two-letter and single-dictionary-word .com names, most of them registered decades ago, several of them sold to buyers with strategic reasons that have nothing to do with any formula. They are the extreme tail of a distribution whose bulk is invisible. No verified source publishes a median or average domain sale price for 2026, which is itself informative: the market is thin enough and unreported enough that nobody can credibly state one.

The practical instruction is simple. When you look at that chart, do not calibrate on it. Calibrate on the comps for names like yours, and treat any similarity between your name and a name on that list as coincidence unless your name is also two letters long.

The break-even test: what your name has to clear

There is a second question hiding inside “what is my domain worth”, and it is usually the more actionable one: what would it have to be worth for holding it to have made sense?

The test is straightforward. Renew only if (realistic annual probability of sale) × (realistic net sale price) > (annual carrying cost). Plug in real numbers. At a 1% annual sell-through rate — conservative but within the range experienced investors describe as normal — and a .com renewal at Porkbun's published $11.08, the name needs a realistic net sale price above roughly $1,100 to make the renewal a positive bet. At a .io renewal of $51.80 the bar is about $5,180. At an .ai renewal of $82.70, with a mandatory two-year minimum term, it is higher again.

Two adjustments make it harsher. Commission comes off the top, so a $1,100 net at 15% means a $1,294 gross sale, and at 30% a $1,571 one. And carrying cost is not flat: the .com wholesale registry fee is rising from $10.26 to $10.97 on 1 November 2026, under a contract permitting increases of up to 7% in eligible years, with Domain Name Wire projecting $13.42 by the end of the current cycle.

Bob Hawkes's NamePros model formalises the same arithmetic and, at a 1% sell-through rate with a 4% cost of capital, a 6% profit target and 15% commission, produces a minimum retail price of roughly $1,150–$2,140 for a hand-registered .com depending on how long you have carried it. Those are one analyst's stated assumptions rather than an industry standard — the structure is the useful part, not the number.

Most domains are worth very little, and here is how to tell

There were 401.6 million registered domain names at the end of Q2 2026. The apparent industry-wide sell-through rate derived from reported sales is under 1% a year. The arithmetic is unforgiving and most owners resolve it by never asking the question.

Four checks that will tell you where your name sits, in ascending order of bluntness:

• The comp test. Can you find five sales of genuinely similar names above your target price? If every comparable sold for $300, yours is not a $5,000 name because you like it more.
• The buyer test. Name the business that needs it and the reason it would pay. Vagueness here is the answer.
• The inquiry test. How many genuine inbound inquiries in three years, on a domain that was listed and had a for-sale page? Zero over three years is data, not bad luck.
• The re-registration test. If the name were available today at standard price, would you register it again? If no, you have your valuation.

A name that fails all four is worth the renewal fee to somebody, which is to say it is worth nothing. That is not a reason to feel foolish — it is the base rate. The useful response is to list it anyway, since listing is free on the major non-exclusive platforms, and to stop renewing when the arithmetic says stop.

Frequently asked questions