How much does the .com price increase on 1 November 2026 cost me?
Verisign raises the .com registry wholesale fee from $10.26 to $10.97 on 1 November 2026 at 04:00 UTC, and every registrar pays it. Porkbun, which lists $11.08 for registration, renewal and transfer, says its price becomes about $11.81. Adding the ICANN transaction fee of $0.20, the floor price of a .com goes from $10.46 to $11.17. Namecheap renews the same domain at $18.48 today and has announced no post-November price.
Key finding The increase costs $0.73 a year; being at the wrong registrar costs $7.40 a year, ten times as much. Renewing before 1 November holds the current price for every year you buy: Porkbun allows up to 10 years ($110.80 now against $118.10 after), Namecheap up to 5. Porkbun expects about 7% a year through 2030, so five years bought now at $55.40 beats about $67.29 paid year by year.
Prices verified 7 September 2026 against each vendor’s own pricing page, linked in full below.
Updated 9 September 2026. Verisign has since announced the .net fee too: $10.91 to $12.00 on 1 March 2027, which has its own note linked in the last table. Nothing else on this page changed.
Updated 8 September 2026. Corrected a factual error: this page previously said Cloudflare Registrar has no multi-year renewal option. Its documentation does describe one, under manual renewal, and the correction changes the recommendation, so the prepay table now carries an at-cost row.
KEY FINDING. Verisign raises the .com registry wholesale fee from $10.26 to $10.97 on 1 November 2026, and every registrar pays it. At Porkbun that shows up as $11.08 becoming about $11.81 a year, a rise of $0.73. That is the small number. The large one is where you already keep the domain: a .com renews for $18.48 at Namecheap today, $7.40 a year more than Porkbun, which is ten times what the increase costs you. The increase has a deadline you can beat by renewing early; the registrar gap does not go away on its own.
This is a change note for anyone paying for a .com. Every figure below was read on screen on 7 September 2026 from Verisign’s, ICANN’s and each registrar’s own pages, all linked at the end. We hold domains at more than one registrar and have no affiliate relationship with any of them; there are no affiliate links on this page.
What changes, in Verisign’s words
The sentence sits inside Verisign’s first-quarter 2026 results release, dated 23 April 2026: “Verisign announces that it will increase the annual registry-level wholesale fee for each new and renewal .com domain name registration from $10.26 to $10.97 effective Nov. 1, 2026.” Porkbun’s knowledge base adds the hour: the price rises on “November 1, 2026, 0400 UTC.”
That fee is what a registrar pays the registry for one year of one .com. On top of it every ICANN-accredited registrar owes a transaction fee, which ICANN’s own fee page and its FY2026 announcement both put at $0.20 per transaction, “assessed on each annual increment of an add, renew, or transfer transaction.” So the floor price of a .com, before any registrar adds anything, is $10.46 today and $11.17 from 1 November.
What it costs at three kinds of registrar
| Where the domain sits | One year today | From 1 November | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| At cost (registry fee plus the ICANN fee, no markup). Cloudflare Registrar states it “does not mark up domain prices at all” and that customers “only pay the price charged by registries and ICANN” | $10.46 | $11.17 | +$0.71 (6.9%), our arithmetic on the two official fees |
| Porkbun, list price, the same for registration, renewal and transfer | $11.08 | about $11.81, Porkbun’s own figure | +$0.73 (6.6%) |
| Namecheap, renewal price (its first-year price is $10.98 on sale, list $14.98; the renewal is what you pay every year after) | $18.48 | Not announced | Unknown. The registry increase applies to Namecheap too |
Porkbun’s margin over the floor price is $0.62 today and $0.64 after the change, which is roughly what card processing costs. Namecheap’s renewal sits $8.02 above the floor. Both are legitimate business models, and Namecheap’s first year is genuinely cheap. The point is only that the number you renew at every year is the one that matters, and the gap between those two numbers is far larger than anything Verisign is doing on 1 November.
The cheapest way through it: renew before 1 November, for as many years as you will keep the name
A renewal adds years onto the expiry date you already have, so renewing early throws nothing away. Porkbun says this outright: “If you’re not planning to switch up your domain any time soon, lock in today’s prices by renewing for years ahead. The max renewal period allotted per domain is 10 years.” Namecheap’s pricing page shows renewal terms up to five years, priced at exactly five times the one-year figure.
| What you do with one .com | Cost | Note |
|---|---|---|
| At cost, renew 10 years before 1 November | about $104.60 | $10.46 x 10. This is our arithmetic on the registry and ICANN fees, not a figure Cloudflare publishes. Check the amount the Renew for drop-down actually quotes before buying |
| Porkbun, renew 10 years before 1 November | $110.80 | $11.08 x 10, the current price locked for a decade |
| Porkbun, renew the same 10 years after 1 November | $118.10 | $7.30 more, and that assumes the price then stays at $11.81 for ten years, which Porkbun says it will not |
| Porkbun, renew 5 years before 1 November | $55.40 | Covers 2026 through 2030 |
| Porkbun, pay year by year across the same five years | about $67.29 | $11.89 more. Our projection, using Porkbun’s stated expectation of about 7% a year to 2030; not a committed price |
| Namecheap, renew 5 years today at the published renewal price | $92.40 | $37.00 more than the same five years at Porkbun, before the increase is counted at all |
Two caveats on the prepay move. It is only a saving if you are certain you want the name for that long, because a renewal is not refundable and a domain you abandon in year three has cost you seven wasted years. The at-cost route offers it too. Cloudflare’s documentation describes an annual auto-renewal that first fires about 30 days before expiry, but manual renewal is a separate path: under Registration, “Renew/Extend Domain” opens a Renew for drop-down where you “choose a number of years to renew your domain (up to 10 years).” The same page states that “additional years are always added to the current expiration date regardless of when the renewal takes place,” so renewing early wastes no time here either. It does not say how much of those ten years an existing unexpired term consumes, so read the drop-down against your own expiry date rather than assuming ten fresh years. At cost therefore wins on the per-year price without giving up the ability to buy years forward.
Why this keeps happening, and what the next four years look like
This is not a one-off. Porkbun’s page states the expectation plainly: “we anticipate the price of .com domains to increase by about 7% every year from 2026 until 2030,” and quotes the contract behind it, under which the registry operator “is entitled to increase the Maximum Price […] in each Pricing Year of the final four Pricing Years of every six year period, with the first six year period beginning on October 26, 2018.”
Only the 1 November figure is confirmed by Verisign. The rest of this table is arithmetic on Porkbun’s stated expectation, shown so the size of the decision is visible, and it is a projection rather than a price anyone has committed to.
| Year | Registry wholesale | Porkbun retail, projected | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Now, to 31 Oct 2026 | $10.26 | $11.08 | Current, read on screen |
| From 1 Nov 2026 | $10.97 | about $11.81 | Confirmed by Verisign and by Porkbun |
| 2027 | $11.74 | $12.58 | Projection at 7% |
| 2028 | $12.56 | $13.40 | Projection at 7% |
| 2029 | $13.44 | $14.28 | Projection at 7% |
| 2030 | $14.38 | $15.22 | Projection at 7% |
Who is affected
| Your situation | What happens |
|---|---|
| You own a .com anywhere | Your next renewal on or after 1 November 2026 04:00 UTC is priced from the new wholesale fee. The registry fee is the same for every registrar, so no registrar escapes it |
| You renew before that moment | Every year you buy is at today’s price, including years that fall after the change |
| You are mid-term on a multi-year registration | Nothing happens until that term ends. The fee applies to new registrations and renewals, not to time already paid for |
| You are registering a new .com | Same increase, and the first-year discounts many registrars advertise are unaffected by it. Check the renewal price before you take the discount |
| You hold .net | A different date and a bigger step: $10.91 to $12.00 on 1 March 2027, the full 10% the .net contract allows |
Limits of this page
We read four pages and did arithmetic on them. We did not survey every registrar: three were chosen because they represent the three shapes of pricing, and prices at other registrars will differ. Namecheap has published no post-November price, so its row is left blank rather than guessed. Currency conversion, local taxes and card fees are excluded. The 2027 to 2030 rows are a projection of Porkbun’s stated expectation and nothing more. If any figure here stops matching the vendor’s page, the verified date at the top of this article is the date it was true.
Sources, read on screen 7 September 2026
- Verisign, 23 April 2026: Verisign Reports First Quarter 2026 Results (“from $10.26 to $10.97 effective Nov. 1, 2026”)
- Porkbun: Why did .com prices go up and how high will they go (1 November 0400 UTC, about $11.81, about 7% a year to 2030, 10-year maximum renewal, the contract quote) and the domain pricing list ($11.08 registration, renewal and transfer)
- Namecheap: .com domain pricing (registration $10.98 on sale from $14.98, renewal $18.48, transfer $11.48, terms to five years)
- ICANN: Registrar fees and the FY2026 registrar-level fees announcement ($0.20 per transaction)
- Cloudflare: Cloudflare Registrar (“does not mark up domain prices at all”) and Renew domains (annual auto-renewal about 30 days before expiry, plus a manual “Renew for” drop-down of up to 10 years)
- Our running record of dated 2026 price changes: the infrastructure price change ledger. The domain line in a full site budget is in what it costs to run one WordPress site for a year