Worldwide Domain Name Registrations Nearing the 400 Million Mark After a Healthy 1st Quarter Detailed in Latest Verisign Industry Brief 

VeriSign, (the administrator of the .com and .net TLDs) has released their latest quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) covering the 1st quarter of 2026. This update showed that the total number of domain registrations across all TLDs worldwide ended the most recent quarter at 392.5 million. With 24.1 million domains added over the past year, that reprsents a healthy 6.5% leap year over year. As a point of comparison, at the end of Q1-2025 total domains registered had only risen 1.7% from the previous year. 

.Com, by far, the dominant TLD on the Internet, ended the latest quarter with 163.6 million registered domains, up 6.4 million YOY, representing a 4% increase. .Net went the opposite direction with a slight dip from 12.6 million registrations last year to 12.4 million at the end of 1Q-2026.

ccTLDs finished the latest quarter with 146.3million registrations, 3.4 million more than a year ago, representing a 2.4% increase YOY. New gTLDs, working from a smaller user base, were able to pile up more impressive gains percentage wise. With 49.6 million registrations at the end of 1Q-2026, the new G's were up a whopping 31.3% after adding 11.8 milliion domains over the past year.

For legacy gTLDs not including .com and .net (a group dominated by .org that also includes older TLDs that were released prior to the beginning of ICANN's new gTLD program in 2012 like .info and .biz), registrations stood at 20.5 million at the end of the latest quarter, up 2.6 million domains from a year ago. That gave this group a double digit increase of 14.6% year over year.

(Posted May 4, 2026)   

*****