Who Sets the Floor Under Your Domain Renewals?

Every domain name a hosting company sells has a price floor underneath it that the hosting company doesn’t control: the wholesale fee the registry charges for each registration and renewal. The two biggest registries have both raised that fee in the past few years, so I checked the filings and announcements.

.com: seven percent, almost every year

Verisign is the sole registry operator for .com. Its SEC filings state that it is “permitted to increase the price of a .com domain name registration by up to 7% in each of the final four years of each six-year period”, and that it will remain the sole operator “through November 30, 2030”. Its own filings give the wholesale fee history:

That is a 39.7% rise since 2021, from $7.85 to $10.97. For a host or reseller managing 1,000 .com names, the registry fee alone goes from $7,850 a year to $10,970, an extra $3,120 a year, before any registrar markup or ICANN fees. Verisign announced the latest step on 23 April 2026. (Sources: Verisign’s SEC filings, Q3 2022, Q2 2023 and Q2 2026.)

ICANN’s summary of the 2024 renewal says the pricing authority goes back to a 2018 amendment by the US Department of Commerce, which “removed the prior price freeze restriction”. It also records that commenters objected to the registry’s ability to raise the maximum wholesale price, asked for the contract to go to open bidding, and asked for an economic study before renewal. The agreement was renewed anyway (ICANN public comment page).

.org: a decade flat, then up

Public Interest Registry raised the wholesale price of .org from $9.93 to $11.00, announced to take effect on 1 June 2026, a rise of 10.8%. Domain Name Wire reported it as the first .org increase since 2016, and said PIR told it there are no further plans to raise prices at this time. The same article notes that .org’s price caps were removed in the 2019 registry agreement (Domain Name Wire).

The opinion part

A registry price is the same for every registrar, so this is not a story about big suppliers treating small ones differently. It is a story about who holds the pricing power. .com has one operator, a contract that lets it raise prices about 7% a year for four years out of every six, and a renewal that runs to 2030. That isn’t a market, and every registrar and reseller downstream simply absorbs the increase or passes it on. The ones with the least room to absorb it are small providers selling domains at thin margins.

Registry fees only. Registrar markups and ICANN’s own per-registration fees are not included. Figures are from Verisign’s SEC filings and the sources linked above, checked on 3 October 2026.