Why your .com domain is about to cost a little more

A dental practice in Fishers owns four domain names. The dentist can name two of them.

The other two are a landing page for a teeth whitening promotion from 2021 and a misspelled version of the practice name, registered years ago by a marketing company "for protection" and forgotten since. All four auto-renew every year, on a card the office doesn't check.

On April 23, 2026, Verisign, the company that runs the .com registry, announced it is raising the price it charges for every .com domain on earth. The wholesale price goes from $10.26 a year to $10.97, a 7 percent increase, effective November 1, 2026. If you own a .com, and almost every shop does, your renewal price is about to go up, whether you notice it or not.

That's the wholesale price: what your registrar, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, whoever you bought the domain through, pays Verisign before marking it up and selling it to you. When the wholesale number moves, the retail price you pay usually follows within a year, sometimes sooner.

Why does one company get to raise the price?

Verisign didn't pick 7 percent because it feels fair. That number is the ceiling written into its contract.

Verisign runs the .com registry under a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce, put in place because .com has no real substitute. There's no competing registry you can move a .com domain to if you don't like the price. The agreement caps how much Verisign can raise wholesale prices: up to 7 percent a year, in four of every six years. Verisign last raised prices in September 2024. If it takes the full 7 percent every year its contract allows, the wholesale price climbs from $10.26 today to $13.42 by 2030.

Verisign posted an 88 percent gross margin and a 68 percent operating margin in 2025, among the highest of any company in the S&P 500. The increase has nothing to do with covering rising costs. The contract allows it, and Verisign is taking it.

How many domains does your shop own?

On one domain, an extra seventy-one cents a year will not change your month. The real risk is that most small businesses pay for more domains than they remember owning.

The dental office in Fishers is typical. Shops pick up domains the way they pick up old business cards: a name from before a rebrand, a seasonal promotion page, a defensive misspelling a vendor registered once and never followed up on. Each one renews automatically, at whatever price the registrar sets, until somebody happens to notice, or the card on file expires.

A .com you forgot you registered five years ago is still a domain you're paying to keep.

What to do before November 1

Two things, and both take less than twenty minutes.

First, log into wherever you registered your domains and pull the full list, every domain you have ever registered, not only the one you use every day. Look for names you don't recognize, pages you have not touched in years, and anything auto-renewing on a card you do not check.

Second, for the domain or domains you use, renew now for as many years as your registrar allows. Most allow up to ten. Locking in today's price before November 1 costs the same as a normal renewal, done a few months early. For everything else, let it lapse, or point it at your real website instead of paying for two.

The dentist in Fishers canceled the teeth whitening landing page and pointed the misspelled domain at her real site. Neither decision took more than a few minutes. The renewal emails had been sitting in her inbox for three years.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Breaking: VeriSign raising wholesale .com prices	The $10.26 to $10.97 price change, the November 1, 2026 effective date, and Verisign's 2025 gross and operating margins.
2	The .com Cooperative Agreement: Ensuring Internet Stability and Security	Why Verisign's .com pricing is capped and overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce rather than set by open competition.
3	Verisign can increase .com prices in 2026	The 7 percent a year, four of six years pricing structure and the trajectory toward $13.42 by the end of the current contract cycle.