Domain Expiry Checker and Continuous Registration Monitoring

The expiration date lives in the public registration record. There are two ways to read it.

RDAP is the modern protocol. It returns structured data, so the expiration date, status codes, and nameservers come back in consistent fields. Every gTLD registry supports it, and many country-code registries do too.

WHOIS is the older protocol. It returns free text in whatever layout the registry chose, which is why one lookup says "Registry Expiry Date" and another says "renewal date" and a third omits it entirely. Some country-code registries still only offer WHOIS.

Our free lookup tool picks the right protocol for the extension automatically and shows you the parsed result. That answers the question for today. The harder problem is the one after it: the answer changes, and you will not be watching when it does.

Three things make a one-time lookup unreliable.

The date moves. Owners renew, often at the last minute and sometimes automatically. A date you wrote in your calendar three months ago may already be a year later.

The date is not the event. A domain does not become available on its expiration date. It enters a sequence of phases first, and each phase has its own rules about who can get the name and how. The date tells you when the sequence starts, not when you can act.

Status changes without the date changing. A name can pick up a hold, lose a transfer lock, or enter redemption while the expiration date sits still. Those flags are frequently the more valuable signal, and they are the ones people miss because they only wrote down the date.

After the expiration date passes, a generic domain typically moves through the following. Exact windows vary by registry and registrar, so treat these as the shape rather than a guarantee.

1. Auto-renew grace period. Roughly 0 to 45 days. The registrar can still renew the name for the owner at the normal price. The website often goes down during this phase, which is why it looks abandoned before it legally is.
2. Redemption period. Around 30 days for most generic extensions. The owner can still recover the name, but usually only by paying a substantial redemption fee. Many names come back here.
3. Pending delete. Five days for .com and .net. Nothing can save the name now. This is the window where backorders matter, because at the end of it the registry releases the name.
4. Release. The name is deleted and can be registered again. In practice, professional drop-catch services almost always win this instant on anything desirable.

Alongside all of this, many registrars send expiring names to an auction partner before the deletion sequence completes. That auction is often where the name actually changes hands, which is why watching only the expiry date leaves you a step behind.

Monitoring is the same lookup, repeated, with the results compared. That difference is what turns data into an alert.

We read the record 25+ times a day per watched domain, store every field, and diff it against the previous value. When something moves, we work out what kind of change it was and send you the version that matters: not "status field updated" but "pending delete phase started, here is your backorder checklist."

Because we keep the history, you also get context. You can see that a name has been renewed late three years running, or that its nameservers moved to a parking provider two months before the listing appeared. That pattern is not visible in any single lookup.

We monitor domains across all 2,205 extensions in the IANA root zone, and we add new ones as they launch.

Depth varies by registry, and we would rather be straight with you about it. Generic extensions expose full status codes, so you get the complete lifecycle picture. Some country-code registries publish less, occasionally only whether the name is registered and when it expires. In those cases you still get change detection on everything they do publish, plus the DNS and website signals, which are registry independent.