.uk domains: who runs the registry and who can register

Nominet UK is the IANA-listed manager for .uk and it runs the registry itself, no outsourced back end, no separate company handling the technical side. Nominet describes itself as running the .UK registry alongside the wider UK Domain Family (.uk, .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk), and it sets the .UK Registration Policy, Registry-Registrar Agreement and Rules of Registration that govern the space, published via its policy pages.

Nominet is a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, with member registrars rather than a corporate parent sitting above it, according to Wikipedia's summary of the company. Its technical back end still runs on what Nominet calls its legacy platform, though a move to Nominet's own Registry Services Provider platform is planned to land alongside new .UK policies, per its registrar policy pages.

In .uk terms, the registry is Nominet: it holds the authoritative database, writes the rules and decides what a registrar is allowed to do. A registrar is the accredited company you actually buy from, part of Nominet's registrar network, and it handles your order, billing and support. The registrant is you, or your organisation, the party named on the registration and bound by Nominet's Terms and Conditions of Domain Name Registration. Day-to-day changes go through your registrar, but the rules underneath always trace back to Nominet.

The .uk registry, run by Nominet, is about as open as it gets: anyone anywhere can register one, no UK residency requirement, no need for a UK business registration. Cloudflare confirms this in its own registration guidance, as does eNom. There are exceptions carved out for specific sub-domains: gov.uk is reserved for government bodies, ac.uk for academic institutions, and both run their own eligibility checks separate from the general rule.

Individual registrars layer some procedural requirements on top of that open policy. You need a registrant name of at least four characters, with three of those being letters, and if your .uk domain has a matching .co.uk, .org.uk or .me.uk registration, the WHOIS details on both are expected to line up, according to Namecheap's registration notes. That matching requirement dates back to a June 2019 deadline, when holders of those older domain types were given the chance to claim the matching .uk name before it went to general release. Anything unclaimed by that date became available to anyone from 1 July 2019 onwards.

Registration lengths run from a minimum of one year up to ten, per eNom's policy summary. Nothing in the available documentation points to premium name tiers or classes beyond these standard terms.

A .uk domain runs from registration through to its expiry date, and you can renew it any time before that cut-off, for anywhere between 1 and 10 years at a stretch, per the registry's minimum and maximum terms. Let it lapse and Nominet won't wipe it overnight. You get a 30-day renewal grace period first, the domain sits suspended, but you can still reclaim it at the standard renewal rate with no penalty fee (20i).

Miss that window and a further 60-day stretch kicks in, sometimes called scheduled deletion. This is where .uk parts ways with the usual gTLD playbook: there's no separate redemption fee, and you can still renew normally. Add it up and you're looking at roughly 90 days post-expiry before things get serious. Then comes a final 5-day pending-delete stage, renewal is off the table by this point, before the name drops for anyone to grab on a first-come, first-served basis (20i).

Nothing in the source material spells out .uk-specific transfer lock periods or how the authorisation code mechanism works in detail. Worth flagging: ICANN's 60-day inter-registrar transfer lock is a gTLD rule, it doesn't automatically bind ccTLDs like .uk. Transfers here answer to Nominet's own Registry-Registrar Agreement instead. That agreement, along with the Rules of Registration and the registry platform underneath it, is getting an overhaul known as .UK Standardisation, set to land on 9 February 2027 (Nominet registrar resources).