.eu domain registration: EURid rules explained

EURid vzw is a Belgian non-profit and the IANA-listed sole registry operator for .eu, appointed by the European Commission under a service concession contract first awarded in 2004 and renewed in 2014. It has no corporate parent. EURid started life in 2003 as a consortium of the Belgian and Italian national ccTLD operators, with Sweden's registry joining later, per Wikipedia's account of EURid's history.

The European Commission sets the policy, laying down the legal framework through Regulation (EU) 2019/517 and its predecessor, and checking EURid's performance against the concession contract. EURid runs its own technical infrastructure rather than farming it out to a backend provider, with name servers in Amsterdam and Ljubljana and administrative systems split between Amsterdam and Luxembourg.

So: EURid is the registry. It holds the master database and sets policy for .eu, full stop. You never deal with EURid directly, you register through an accredited registrar, a commercial company that sells and manages the domain on your behalf. You, the registrant, hold the registration rights but need to keep your eligibility and contact data current, because EURid can and will suspend a domain if verification checks fail.

Registration is locked down at the registry level. Under EU regulation, eligible registrants are Union citizens regardless of residence, natural persons resident in an EU or EEA member state, and undertakings or organisations established in the EU or EEA. That eligibility was widened in 2014 to include Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, once the .eu regulation was folded into the EEA agreement.

This is a registry rule, not something a registrar can decide to bend, so no accredited registrar has the power to waive it. A foreign company with no EU or EEA establishment cannot get a .eu domain, even if it owns a valid EU trademark. Registrars may ask for supporting paperwork, proof of address, company registration and so on, to confirm you actually qualify, and EURid runs its own verification checks on top of that. Fail to respond to one of their data queries and the domain gets suspended.

The naming rules, by contrast, are fairly relaxed. Labels can run from 2 to 63 characters, numbers and hyphens are fine (just not at the start or end), and internationalised domain names sit alongside the standard Latin-script .eu extension.

.eu is a ccTLD, which means it lives outside ICANN's usual transfer and grace-period rulebook for gTLDs like .com. You still need an authorisation code to move a domain between EURid-accredited registrars, but the 60-day post-registration lock that ICANN forces on .com and friends simply doesn't exist here. That's because .eu answers to EURid's own rules and to Regulation (EU) 2019/517, not ICANN consensus policy, per domaindetails.com.

Renewal terms depend on who you ask, and the sources don't agree. Europe Registry lists a straight 1-year minimum and maximum per cycle (Europe Registry), while Netim and ResellerClub both describe registration or renewal periods stretching up to 10 years (Netim, ResellerClub). Don't take either number as gospel, ask your registrar directly what multi-year options they actually offer.

Once a .eu domain expires, the rules changed for anything registered after 15 September 2014: the domain runs out its term, gets deleted, then sits in a 40-day redemption period with no separate pending-delete window tacked on afterwards, according to ResellerClub and Rebel.com. Restore fees aren't set by EURid at all, individual registrars decide those themselves, so any specific price you spot quoted somewhere is that registrar's own charge, not a registry standard.