How it works

When a domain expires it does not become available that day. It goes through a fixed sequence that takes about five weeks, and only the last five days of it are predictable to the hour. This site tracks names through that sequence across 1,078 top-level domains and tells you when each one is actually released.

The life of an expiring domain

Where our data comes from

Two sources, used for two different jobs.

Zone files tell us where to look

Registries publish a file once a day listing every domain in their TLD that has nameservers. We download each day's file and compare it with the previous one. A name that was there yesterday and is gone today has almost always been deleted, and is about to begin the sequence above. That comparison is how we find candidates without buying anybody's list.

The registry tells us the truth

A zone file says a name vanished. It does not say why, or when it will be released — a domain can also lose its nameservers because the owner removed them, or because the registry placed it on hold. So every date published here comes from asking the registry directly, through RDAP, the protocol registries run to answer exactly this kind of question. We read the status and the dates from that answer and compute the release from the registry's own lifecycle, rather than assuming.

That is the whole reason this site exists rather than being a copy of a list. If we tell you a name drops on a Tuesday at 2pm, it is because the registry told us it is in pending delete, not because someone else said so.

What the states mean

• Registered — in use, with a normal registration. Nothing is happening to it.
• Redemption period — expired and deleted, but the previous owner can still buy it back for about 30 days. Worth watching, not worth counting on.
• Pending delete — the final five days. Beyond recovery, with a release date we can predict.
• Available — released. Anyone can register it at any registrar right now.
• Checking — we have the name but have not asked the registry yet. It resolves within a few minutes.

How current is it?

Zone files arrive once a day, so a name that leaves a zone appears here the same day the registry publishes it. Registry checks are paced deliberately: we run one worker with one address and stay inside every registry's limits, which means a name is checked once or twice in its life rather than constantly — about 30 days after it leaves the zone, and again shortly before its predicted release only if it was still in redemption then, the one stage in which an owner can buy it back. Searching a name we have never seen queues an immediate check, and the page updates itself when the answer arrives.

All times on the site are shown in America/New_York. Registry release windows differ, and drop times lists what we have measured for each.

Rank and Linking Domains

Some names about to be released still have other sites linking to them. Two figures on the lists say so. Both come from Common Crawl, a non-profit that crawls a few billion pages of the open web every month and publishes the graph of which domains link to which, built from a few months of crawling at a time — at the moment its crawls of Jul–Sep 2026, a graph of 133,241,980 domains.

• Linking Domains — how many other domains link to the name. A site that links a thousand times counts once, so this is not a count of backlinks. 0 means Common Crawl knows the name and found nobody linking to it; a dash means it has never met the name.
• Rank — a score from 0.00 to 10.00 for where the name stands among all the domains in that graph by how well connected it is (Common Crawl's own ordering, harmonic centrality). The best connected domain is 10 and the last is 0, and the scale is logarithmic: each step up is much harder to climb than the one below it, so most names sit under 3 and anything over 4 is well connected. Only a name somebody links to has one.

Read them as a first look, not a verdict. They are not Domain Authority or Page Authority, which are Moz's own scores. Common Crawl is a sample of the web, so "none found" is not proof of none; the figures are a month or more old by the time they are published; and the count takes a link from a newspaper and a link from a page of spam as the same. The drop list sorts by either, and its filter panel keeps the names with at least 1, 10 or 100 linking domains.

What we don't do

We don't sell domains, don't run backorders, and don't take a cut from anyone who does. There are no affiliate links on result pages. That is a deliberate choice: the only thing this site has to offer is an honest answer about a date, and an outbound link that earns a commission quietly changes what the page is for.

We also don't publish personal registrant details. Registries stopped including them in public responses years ago, and where they are still available we do not store or show them.

Where to start

• The drop list — every confirmed release, sortable by date or name.
• Dropping today — everything being released today, plus what left each zone.
• Drop times — when each registry actually releases names.
• Or type any domain into the box at the top and see its exact position in the sequence above.