How Many Domains Drop Every Day?
The internet added 9.1 million domains last quarter. That headline hides the churn underneath it: on .com and .net alone, somewhere between 90,000 and 120,000 names stop being renewed every single day.
September 21, 20266 min readExpiring domains · Statistics · Aftermarket
The short answer. Around 90,000 to 120,000 .com and .net domains stop being renewed every day. Not all of them reach the drop pool, and the ones worth having are gone in seconds. The working figure below is derived from published registry data, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it.
The number everyone quotes, and what it hides
Verisign's quarterly brief reported 401.6 million domain registrations across all extensions at the end of Q2 2026, an increase of 9.1 million or 2.3% on the previous quarter, and 29.9 million or 8.1% year over year.
Growth of 9.1 million sounds like 9.1 million new domains. It is not. It is the net figure: everything registered minus everything deleted. The gross flows on both sides are far larger, and the deletion side is where expiring domains come from.
Method one: the renewal rate
The DNIB reports a preliminary combined renewal rate for .com and .net of 76.3% for Q1 2026, against a combined base of 179.1 million names at the end of Q2.
If roughly 76% of names due for renewal are renewed, roughly 24% are not. Over a year, essentially the whole base comes up for renewal once:
179.1 million x 23.7% = 42.4 million non-renewals per year
42.4 million / 365 = about 116,000 per day
Method two: the growth gap
A second route, using different figures as a cross-check.
New .com and .net registrations ran at 11.5 million in Q1 2026. The combined base grew by 3.0 million during Q2. If gross additions are in the same range quarter to quarter, then deletions account for the difference:
11.5 million new - 3.0 million net growth = 8.5 million deletions per quarter
8.5 million / 91 days = about 93,000 per day
Two independent methods landing between 93,000 and 116,000 is about as much agreement as you can expect from public quarterly data. Call it 90,000 to 120,000 .com and .net domains per day, and remember that is two extensions out of more than a thousand.
What the estimate does not account for
Worth stating plainly, because numbers like this get repeated without their caveats.
Non-renewal is not the same as dropping. A name can be restored during redemption, and a meaningful share of valuable names are.
The renewal rate is quarterly and preliminary. Applying one quarter's rate across a year assumes a uniformity that does not exactly hold, since registrations cluster seasonally.
Deletions lag expiry by about 75 days. The names dropping today stopped being paid for around two and a half months ago.
This is .com and .net only. Both are mature extensions with high renewal rates. Newer and cheaper extensions churn considerably harder, so the all-TLD figure is larger, and much of that volume is names registered for a dollar and abandoned.
The timeline a domain follows
An expired domain does not become available immediately. It moves through a sequence, and each stage is visible in the registry status codes.
| Stage | Duration | Status | Who can act |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto-renew grace | Up to 45 days | autoRenewPeriod | Owner renews at normal price |
| Redemption | About 30 days | redemptionPeriod | Owner only, plus a redemption fee |
| Pending delete | 5 days | pendingDelete | Nobody |
| Dropped | Instant | none | First to register |
Roughly 75 days from expiry to release. ICANN's EPP status code reference documents each of these, and any RDAP lookup will show you which stage a given name is in.
Why you will not catch the good ones
At 100,000 drops a day, it is tempting to assume there is treasure lying around. There is, and it is collected by software.
Drop-catching services maintain large numbers of registrar connections and fire registration requests at the exact moment a name is released. For any name with obvious value, the window between release and registration is measured in fractions of a second, and the outcome is often decided by an auction between catching services rather than by anyone typing into a search box.
What that leaves for everyone else is the long tail: names with no keyword value but real utility for a specific project, and names whose value is not obvious to a scoring algorithm. Those are worth watching for, and they are the realistic target.
The practical approach is not to race the catchers. It is to watch specific names you already care about and be ready when they reach pendingDelete. We covered the mechanics in What Happens When a Domain Expires, and our checker reports the registry lifecycle state for any name you look up.
Common questions
How many domains expire every day?
On .com and .net, an estimated 90,000 to 120,000 per day stop being renewed, derived from published registry renewal rates and registration figures. Across all extensions the figure is considerably higher.
How many domains are registered in total?
401.6 million across all top-level domains at the end of Q2 2026, according to Verisign's quarterly brief, of which .com and .net accounted for 179.1 million.
What percentage of domains are renewed?
The preliminary combined renewal rate for .com and .net was 76.3% in Q1 2026, so roughly one in four is not renewed. Newer and cheaper extensions typically renew at lower rates.
How long after expiry does a domain become available?
About 75 days: up to 45 days of grace period, around 30 days of redemption where only the owner can recover it for a fee, then a 5-day pending delete window before release.
Can I register a good domain the moment it drops?
Rarely by hand. Valuable drops are caught by automated services with many registrar connections, often within a fraction of a second, and frequently go to auction between them. Monitoring specific names you want is more realistic than competing for general drops.
Where does this data come from?
Verisign's Domain Name Industry Brief, published quarterly at DNIB.com, which reports total registrations, the .com and .net base, new registrations and preliminary renewal rates. The daily estimates here are derived from those figures, with the arithmetic shown above.
Put the research to work.
Check your shortlist across the extensions that matter, then save the strongest names to a project.
Check a domain