Domains
Domain age and registrar checker
See how old a domain is by its registry registration date, and which registrar holds it.
Free, no accountLive check
Result
The verdict appears here once you press Check age and registrar.
What this is
This domain age checker answers one question from the registry’s own record - how long ago this name was first registered - and shows the registrar and the other dates that came with the same answer, including the part most age checkers leave out: what the number does not tell you.
Every registry publishes a registration event for the names under its ending: the moment that name was created in the registry, the one date everyone means by "domain age". It is read over RDAP (RFC 9083), the same structured answer that carries the registrar and the expiry date, so the number here is not an estimate from archived pages or from when a site first appeared in an index.
The registrar is a separate fact in the same answer: whoever currently sponsors the registration at the registry. It changes when a name is transferred and the creation date does not, which is why a name can be twenty years old at a registrar that has held it for three weeks.
How to read the result
The age is counted on the calendar from the registration date to today, in whole years and months, and in days while a name is still too new for a month to be a useful unit. The registration date itself is shown beside it so the arithmetic can be checked by hand.
The rest of the panel is what the same answer carried: the registrar, a transfer date if there is one, the expiry date, and when the record last changed. A name registered or transferred inside the last 60 days gets a note, because ICANN’s Transfer Policy lets a registrar refuse a move in that window.
A quick age and registrar read like this is one check in a bigger routine; our guide Holding a domain portfolio: renewals, status codes and the names that attack yours covers the others worth running on the same name, from renewal cost to lookalike domains registered against it.
Common mistakes
What goes wrong most often, and how to tell.
- Treating an old creation date as a trust signalDropped domains with long histories are bought and repointed constantly, which is why Google documents expired domain abuse as a spam practice of its own. The date survives the sale; nothing about the previous owner’s reputation comes with it, in either direction.
- Reading the registration date as "when this business started"Plenty of long-running companies registered their current name late, after a rebrand or after buying the name from someone else, and plenty of defensive registrations sit untouched for a decade with no business behind them at all. The date is about the name, not the organisation.
- Expecting the registrar to be who you bought it fromResellers register names through an accredited registrar, so the registry names the accredited party rather than the storefront that took your money. Both can renew and support the name, but a transfer or a registry-level unlock is handled by the registrar on record here.
- Taking a missing date as an age of zeroThin registry answers and several country-code registries publish no registration event at all. That is an absence of data, not a brand-new domain, and a tool that quietly showed zero days there would be inventing the one number it exists to report.
Questions
What people ask about this tool.
- From the registration event in the registry’s RDAP answer, which is the structured replacement for the old WHOIS creation-date field and is defined in RFC 9083. It is the registry’s own record of when the name was created, and it is what every age checker is reading, whatever else they put around it.
- Age is not something to lean on. An expired name with years of history can be bought by anyone and repurposed, a practice Google’s spam policies name directly as expired domain abuse, so the creation date tells you nothing about who controls the name today or what they are doing with it.
- The registration date is when the name was created at the registry, which is often long before anything was published on it and sometimes long after the business behind it started. Sites also move between domains, so a decade-old brand can sit on a name registered last year.
- Some registries publish no dates in their public answer, and others answer thin, pointing only at the sponsoring registrar’s own server for the detail. When no registration event comes back, this says so instead of guessing, and the registrar - if the answer named one - is where to ask.
- Not from this. RDAP publishes the current registration only, with contact detail usually redacted, and keeps no public record of previous owners or of a registration that has ended, so a name released and re-registered looks identical to one newly created.
Sources
Every fixed value here comes from the provider’s own documentation. These pages change, so each says the day it was last read.
- IETF, “RFC 9083: JSON Responses for the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP)” read 13 October 2026
- ICANN, “Transfer Policy” read 13 October 2026
- Google, “Spam policies for Google web search: expired domain abuse” read 13 October 2026
Use it from the API
The same check, as one request.