.dad domain names: registry rules and renewal terms

Charleston Road Registry Inc. is both the IANA-listed sponsoring organisation and the ICANN-contracted registry operator for .dad, under a Base, Non-Sponsored Registry Agreement signed 23 January 2014. This is Google's registry arm, branded for the public as Google Registry. The technical side, nameservers, RDAP lookups, all of it, runs on Google's own infrastructure rather than being handed off to a third-party back-end provider.

ICANN sits above all this as the policy authority. It holds the contract that sets .dad's rules and compliance obligations, including the requirement that registrars disclose the HTTPS rule before a sale goes through.

Three layers sit on top of each other here. The registry, Charleston Road Registry, holds the master database for every .dad name, sets registration policy such as the HTTPS notice requirement, and runs the servers that answer for the extension. Registrars, GoDaddy or DNSimple among them, are the accredited sellers who handle billing, renewal reminders, DNS management and support for individual .dad domains on the registry's behalf. The registrant is whoever actually buys and holds a given .dad name through one of those registrars. The registry itself never sells to the public directly; you always go through a registrar.

Anyone, anywhere can register a .dad domain, first-come, first-served. No nexus requirement, no professional credential, no proof you belong to some community of dads. That puts it in a different category from the restricted extensions that demand a local presence or a licence before they'll hand over a domain.

The one rule that actually has teeth is technical, not about who you are. Every .dad domain has to run over HTTPS, full stop, because the extension sits on the HSTS preload list. Registrars are required to spell this out before you buy, per Google's registry policy. Beyond that you get the usual boilerplate protections: no registering two-letter labels that pretend to be a government or country-code domain, and reserved strings for the IOC, the Red Cross and various IGOs.

Everything else is just registrar mechanics, and it barely varies. Character limits sit at 2 to 63, letters, numbers and hyphens. Terms run from one year up to ten. Some registrars will slap a premium price on short or dictionary-word .dad names, and what counts as premium is entirely up to them, there's no registry-published list to check against.

Transferring a .dad domain works the same as it does across every other generic top-level domain, nothing special here. You need the AuthInfo code from your current registrar, then hand that code over to the registrar you're moving to. Registrars lock names down in the usual spots: no transfers within 60 days of first registration, within 60 days of a previous transfer, or within 60 days of changing the registrant's name, organisation or email address. Worth flagging though, ICANN's GNSO Council voted in March 2025 to scrap that 60-day lock entirely as part of a broader rewrite of transfer policy. So don't be surprised if this rule quietly vanishes.

You can register a .dad domain for anywhere from one year up to ten, and you pick the term at checkout or renewal time (GoDaddy).

Here's the annoying part: Charleston Road Registry hasn't published a .dad-specific grace period, redemption period, or restore fee anywhere we could find. Elsewhere in the gTLD world the pattern is predictable, a short grace window after renewal, then a redemption period with a restore fee bolted on. For .dad, none of that is spelled out at the registry level, so it's left entirely to individual registrars to decide their own numbers. Don't assume, go and check your registrar's expiry policy directly before you let a .dad name lapse.