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The register, two desk guides and the card index: who holds the name, what it renews at, and how it leaves.

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Expired Domains and the Redemption Window

A domain that lapses does not vanish. It goes through a sequence of stages with names, durations and fees, most of them set by policy rather than by your provider. Knowing the sequence is the difference between a nuisance and a loss.

Filed 5 September 2026Re-read 19 September 2026

A lapsed domain registration is one of the few mistakes in small-business technology that is both completely recoverable and completely unrecoverable, depending on which week you notice. The stages in between have formal names, published durations and, at one point, a fee that bears no relation to the renewal you missed.

Most of the sequence is governed by ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy, which every registrar of a generic top-level domain has to follow. The rest is set by the registry. Very little of it is up to the company you bought from, which is why the shape is the same wherever you registered.

Before expiry: the notices you are owed

The policy places an obligation on registrars to warn you, and it is specific about the timing. Registrars must notify the registered name holder at least twice before expiry: one notice approximately one month before, and one approximately one week before.

The lapse, in order

From the first notice to the open market

  1. About a month beforeFirst notice
  2. About a week beforeSecond notice
  3. ExpirySite and mail stop resolving
  4. Within five days afterA further notice
  5. Deleted: 30 daysRestore only, via your registrar, for a fee
  6. ReleasedAnyone can register it
Drawn from this card. Durations are shown only where ICANN’s Expired Registration Recovery Policy sets them; the gap before deletion is the registrar’s.

There is a third. Within five days after expiration, the registrar must send at least one further notice with instructions for renewing.

So three warnings are required, and people still lose domains. The reason is almost never that the notices were not sent. It is that they were sent to the registrant contact email address on the registration record, which may be an old address, a departed colleague, or — with a particular cruelty — a mailbox on the very domain that is expiring.

Check where those notices are going before you need them. The method is in who owns the domain your builder registered.

At expiry: the site goes dark

At the expiry date the registration stops being active. What happens next is partly the registrar's choice within limits the policy sets.

The policy requires that the existing DNS resolution path be interrupted for registrations deleted within eight days of expiration. In plain terms: the name stops resolving to your servers. Your website is unreachable and your mail is undeliverable, both at the same moment, because they are both reached through the same name.

Many registrars park the name on a holding page during this period, and the policy permits a notice with renewal instructions to be displayed if traffic is being directed to the domain at all.

This is the stage people actually notice, and it is also the easy stage. The domain is still yours and renewing at the ordinary price restores everything. Nothing has been lost except a morning.

After deletion: the Redemption Grace Period

If the registration is not renewed and is eventually deleted, the registry takes over. The policy is unambiguous about the duration: all gTLD registries must offer a Redemption Grace Period of thirty days immediately following the deletion of a registration, during which the deleted registration may be restored.

During that window, the registry disables DNS for the name and blocks transfers. The name is in limbo: not yours to use, not available to anybody else, and recoverable only through the registrar it was registered with.

Two things about this stage are worth internalising.

It is a restore, not a renewal. The operation is technically different and priced differently. Registrars charge a redemption or restore fee on top of the renewal, and the policy explicitly permits this while requiring registrars to disclose renewal fees, post-expiration renewal fees and redemption or restore fees to the holder. The policy does not set the fee's size, and it varies by extension — Squarespace's documentation on reactivating an expired domain says only that a redemption fee may apply and that it varies by TLD, which is the honest answer.

Only your registrar can do it. You cannot shop around, you cannot transfer out of the redemption period, and a third party offering to recover the name for you is selling you the ability to make one phone call.

After redemption: gone

If the redemption period passes without a restore, the name is released and becomes available for registration by anybody. Names with any traffic or history are picked up within seconds by automated systems, and a name that has been backordered by several parties can go to auction.

At this point the remedy is commercial rather than technical. You are negotiating to buy something you used to own, and the price is whatever the new holder believes you will pay.

This site does not and will not carry partner links to domain marketplaces, brokers or recovery services, and this stage is the reason. It is stated on the affiliate disclosure so that the commitment is checkable.

Why a website builder makes this more likely, not less

A bundled domain adds two specific risks to the sequence above.

The first is the divided clock. The plan and the registration renew on different dates and often on different billing schedules, so cancelling a plan in month fourteen can leave a registration you have stopped thinking about, with notices going to an account you have stopped opening.

The second is the notification address. If the registrant contact is a mailbox supplied by the same provider, and the mailbox subscription lapses first, the warnings about the domain are delivered to a mailbox that can no longer receive them. That is not a hypothetical chain — it is the ordinary consequence of buying three subscriptions from one company and cancelling the wrong one first.

The cancellation sequence that avoids it is in cancel the plan, keep the name, and the wider case for keeping the registration away from the builder is on free domain website builder plans.

Five minutes of prevention

  1. Leave auto-renew switched on. There is no scenario in which a business benefits from a domain lapsing.
  2. Check that the card attached to the renewal expires later than the domain does. An expired payment method is the commonest cause of a failed auto-renewal.
  3. Make sure the registrant contact email is on a different domain from the one being renewed.
  4. Put the registry expiry date — not the provider's billing date — in a calendar, with a reminder a fortnight ahead.
  5. If the name genuinely matters, register it for several years at once. Every year you pay for in advance is a year you cannot forget.

If it has already expired

Move now and stop reading. Log into the registrar named on the registration record and renew or restore from there. If the account is inaccessible, telephone them; account recovery is a support conversation and the clock is running while you email.

Do not respond to anything that arrives by post or email offering to secure the name on your behalf. Renewal-notice scams are an old industry and they arrive most heavily around the dates in this card, precisely because expiry data is public.

Queries at the desk

How long do I have to recover an expired domain?
There are two windows. The first is the period after expiry and before deletion, during which the registrar will usually let you renew at the ordinary price. After deletion, ICANN requires every gTLD registry to offer a Redemption Grace Period of thirty days, during which the name can be restored by your registrar for a fee.
Why does restoring a domain cost so much more than renewing it?
Because it is a different operation. A restore pulls a deleted registration back out of the registry's redemption state, and registrars are permitted to charge a redemption or restore fee for it on top of the renewal. The policy requires those fees to be disclosed to you, and they are usually far above the ordinary renewal price.
Can I transfer a domain that is in the redemption period?
No. The registry blocks transfers during the Redemption Grace Period, so the only company that can bring the name back is the registrar it was registered with. Any third party offering to recover it for you is offering to contact that registrar on your behalf.
Does my website builder warn me before my domain expires?
It is required to. ICANN's policy obliges registrars to send at least two notices before expiry, roughly a month and a week ahead, plus a further notice within five days afterwards. Those notices go to the registrant contact address on the record, which is why that address needs to be one you can still open.
See also

Most people arrive at this desk while deciding whether to take a provider up on its domain offer. That decision is worked through in full on free domain website builder plans, which sets out what each provider registers, on whose behalf, and what happens in month thirteen.