The internet ended September 2026 with 411.6 million registered domain names across all top-level domains, according to the Domain Name Industry Brief published by Verisign’s DNIB.com. That’s 9.9 million more than at the end of June, a 2.5% gain in one quarter, and 33 million more than a year earlier, up 8.7%. Three years ago, at the end of the third quarter of 2022, the count stood at 349.9 million.
.com still sets the pace
.com and .net together reached 182.5 million names, up 3.4 million in the quarter and 10.5 million on the year, a 6.1% gain. .com alone stands at 169.8 million and .net at 12.6 million. New .com and .net registrations in the quarter were 13.1 million, against 10.6 million a year earlier.
Do the subtraction and the rest of the market grew faster. The total rose 8.7% while .com and .net rose 6.1%, so the other 229 million names, country codes and new generic extensions, added about 22.5 million between them. .com still holds about 44% of all registered names, but its share is slipping as everything else grows.
Country codes
Country-code domains totalled 151.4 million, up 2.8 million in the quarter and 6.6 million on the year, a 4.6% gain. The ten largest, in the order the brief lists them, are China’s .cn, Germany’s .de, the UK’s .uk, Russia’s .ru, the Netherlands’ .nl, Brazil’s .br, France’s .fr, Australia’s .au, India’s .in and the European Union’s .eu. Country codes grew more slowly than the market as a whole. So the growth outside .com is coming mostly from generic extensions.
What it means for domain holders
More registrations mean more businesses competing for names, and that supports the value of short, clear .com names that already exist. It also means more names sitting in hands that may not renew them. A quarter this strong in new registrations usually brings a rise in deletions about a year later, when promotional first-year prices end and speculative names come up for renewal. Watch the drop lists in late 2027.
Two price points will shape that renewal decision. .com wholesale goes up 71 cents on November 1, 2026. And .web, Verisign’s new extension, opens its sunrise in mid-December with an exact-match window for .com owners from mid-January. Both are covered in our post on Verisign’s third quarter results.
The registry count is at a record. The scarce part, a good name, hasn’t grown at all.