.club domain names: registry, rules and renewal costs

The .club registry is run by Registry Services, LLC, the outfit IANA lists as sponsoring organisation and the contracted party on the ICANN Registry Agreement, signed 8 November 2013. Registry Services, LLC trades under the corporate brand GoDaddy Registry, which claims to support more than 200 top-level domains and provides the core registry and DNS infrastructure behind them.

That wasn't always the setup. IANA's records show .club was originally delegated to .Club Domains, LLC back in January 2014, with Neustar reported as its technical backend by at least one registrar listing. An IANA transfer report dated 17 August 2021 records the domain moving over to Registry Services, LLC. Who runs the technical backend under the current arrangement isn't confirmed in the sources we checked.

ICANN stays on as the policy authority, holding Registry Services, LLC to the terms of the Registry Agreement. In practice, three separate parties matter to anyone buying a .club name: the registry (Registry Services, LLC) sets the rules and holds the master database, a registrar accredited by ICANN sells and manages the individual registration, and the registrant is you, the party recorded in WHOIS as holding the name.

.club has no eligibility restrictions. The registry does not ask for a local presence, a trademark, or any proof that you actually run a club, community or organisation. Anyone, anywhere, can register a name, as confirmed by registrar documentation such as Web Solutions. That's a registry-level policy rather than something individual registrars decide for themselves, so it holds regardless of which accredited registrar you go through.

Registrars will still run their own account and identity checks, and the usual rules on trademark infringement and abuse haven't gone anywhere. Register a name that plainly tramples on someone else's rights and you can still end up with a dispute or a takedown on your hands.

Registration terms run from a minimum of one year up to a maximum of ten, according to Europe Registry's published WHOIS terms. The registry also flags certain names as premium, and these carry higher, variable pricing compared with standard registrations, as set out in GoDaddy's registration agreement. Whether a given name falls into that bracket only becomes clear once you search for it.

You can register a .club domain for as little as one year or lock it in for up to ten in a single go, at least according to the terms one registrar publishes (Europe Registry). Transfers work the same way they do across every gTLD: ICANN's standard 60-day lock kicks in after the initial registration, after any previous transfer, and after certain changes to the registrant's contact details, before you can move the domain to a new registrar.

One registrar advertises renewal as "instant", which just means you can renew whenever you like rather than waiting until the name is about to expire. Let a .club name lapse, though, and the general ICANN Expired Registration Recovery Policy takes over, since this is a non-sponsored gTLD like most others. Registrars have to send at least two notices before expiry, and once the name is deleted there's a 30-day Redemption Grace Period where the original registrant can still get it back (ICANN ERRP). Europe Registry lists a $40.00 restore fee on top of the renewal cost itself (Europe Registry), but nothing in the sources confirms that figure holds across other registrars too.

Prices went up registry-wide on 1 April 2025, pushing typical registration and renewal costs higher (Namecheap). Beyond that, the exact restore pricing elsewhere and the finer mechanics of backend transfers past ICANN's baseline rules simply aren't documented in what's publicly available.

Registry marketing for .club leans hard on subscription and community sites: Spiffster.club (ties), Firstleaf.club (wine), Coffee.club (coffee). See get.club for the full pitch. Coverage from the extension's first year also flagged sports clubs, bloggers and entertainer fan sites picking up .club names, though those specific pages aren't linked in current sources.

Before you go live: the sources we checked show no registry-imposed HTTPS or HSTS mandate for .club, unlike some newer extensions, so certificate setup is just ordinary hosting practice, not a rule handed down from above. Email deliverability and spam-filter reputation for .club aren't covered in the sources reviewed either. Don't assume the worst, just test it with your mail provider before you commit. As a primary domain, .club earns its keep when the name before the dot finishes a phrase, since the extension itself is doing the branding work. Use it purely as a redirect to a .com and you've thrown that value away. Naming tip: put a noun or activity right before .club so the whole string reads naturally, a product, a hobby, a group name. A generic company name gains nothing from sitting next to it.