Domains and WHOIS

What happens when a domain expires?

Missing a renewal is recoverable for about two and a half months, but it gets more expensive and more public at every stage. Knowing the stages is the difference between a ₹900 renewal and a ₹12,000 redemption — or losing the name.

It does not become available immediately. A typical gTLD goes through an auto-renew grace period of up to 45 days, then a 30-day redemption period where only you can recover it and only by paying a redemption fee, then 5 days of pending delete, and only then does it drop and become registrable by anyone. That is roughly 75 days end to end. Your website and email usually stop working far earlier than that — most registrars park the domain within a day or two of expiry, long before you have lost it.

Worked out 2026-09-11 (IST) · ICANN Expired Registration Recovery Policy and Registry Grace Period specification, gTLDs

The timeline, day by day

Day 0 is the expiry date printed in WHOIS. Registrars set their own lengths within the ICANN limits, so treat these as the standard shape rather than a guarantee.

From expiry to drop
Stage	Days from expiry	Status code	Who can recover it	Cost
Still live, grace begins	0–1	autoRenewPeriod	You	Normal renewal
Parked or suspended	1–30	autoRenewPeriod, often + clientHold	You	Normal renewal
End of auto-renew grace	up to 45	autoRenewPeriod	You	Normal renewal
Redemption	45–75	redemptionPeriod	You only, by request	Renewal + redemption fee
Restore requested	within redemption	pendingRestore	You	Already paid
Pending delete	75–80	pendingDelete	Nobody	—
Dropped	about 80	none — the record disappears	Anyone, first come	New registration

What breaks, and in what order

Email goes first and hurts most. Once the domain leaves the zone, inbound mail bounces — and a bounce is not a queue. Those messages are gone, including password resets for every service registered against that address.
The website follows immediately. Visitors see a parking page or a DNS error.
TLS certificates cannot be renewed. Domain validation needs a working DNS or HTTP response, so an expired domain cannot pass an ACME challenge.
Search rankings decay, then reset. A short outage is survivable. A dropped and re-registered domain is treated as new, and the backlink equity does not reliably return.

The three things that actually prevent this

Turn on auto-renew and confirm the card on file has not expired — a dead card is the single most common cause of a lost domain.
Use a registrant email on a different domain, so an outage does not also silence the warnings about the outage.
Register for the longest term you are confident about. Ten years is allowed for most gTLDs and removes the failure mode entirely.

Sources: ICANN Registrar Accreditation Agreement 2013, ICANN Transfer Policy, ICANN Expired Registration Recovery Policy, ICANN Registry Agreement Specification 4 (RDAP), IETF RFC 9083 and RFC 5731 (EPP status codes), and the EU General Data Protection Regulation as applied by ICANN’s Registration Data Policy.

Check your own numbers

Check any domain’s expiry date and current status codes before it bites you.

WHOIS LookupRegistrar, dates, name servers and status codes for any domain.

Frequently asked

How much does it cost to recover an expired domain?

Inside the auto-renew grace period it costs the normal renewal price. Once it reaches redemptionPeriod the registry charges a redemption fee on top, and registrars in India typically pass that on at roughly Rs 6,000 to Rs 15,000 depending on the TLD. That is why the calendar reminder is worth setting.

Can someone buy my domain the moment it expires?

No. Through the auto-renew grace and redemption periods only you can recover it. What they can do is queue for the drop: backorder services place a registration attempt for the exact second the registry releases the name at the end of pendingDelete, and for a domain with traffic or links that release is genuinely competitive.

Why did my website go down before the expiry date passed?

Some registrars replace the name servers with a parking page as soon as the renewal invoice goes unpaid, which can be before the registry expiry date. Others set clientHold at expiry, which removes the domain from DNS entirely. Both are reversible on payment, but neither waits for the 75-day clock.

Does the WHOIS expiry date mean the domain will be free that day?

No. The expiry date in WHOIS is the registration anniversary, the start of the process rather than the end of it. Add roughly 75 days to get the earliest realistic drop date, and watch the status codes rather than the date - redemptionPeriod and pendingDelete tell you where it really is.

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