How we measured it
We took two complete lists of every registered .com name, from 22 June and 1 August 2025, and kept the 4,438,568 names that appeared between them. Their first renewal came due in summer 2026, and our daily records show what happened to each one after that. If a name left the list for 30 days or less, we counted it as kept: registrars pull an expired name and put it back when the owner pays late. A name gone for longer had been deleted, and if it came back, someone new had registered it. The methodology has the details.
Verisign, which runs .com, says first-year renewals are “in the mid-40% range”. About a tenth of new names are registered for two years or more, and our count treats those as kept, so 47.7% fits. Most of the losses came in August 2026, just after the first anniversary, since registrars hold expired names for a few weeks before they delete them.
The topics owners renew
| Names with a word about | Kept a year |
|---|---|
| Real estate | 58.1% |
| Health | 56.7% |
| Travel | 54.3% |
| Home | 54.3% |
| Food | 54.3% |
| Education | 54% |
| Legal | 53.9% |
| Business | 51.7% |
| Finance | 48.5% |
| Tech | 46.6% |
| Retail | 42.5% |
| Crypto | 41.4% |
| Gaming | 41% |
| A brand name | 40% |
| A gambling or adult word | 39.4% |
Real estate, health, travel, home, food and education words sit 6 to 10 points above the average, and the single words at the top of the chart (termite, counseling, therapy, lawns) are trade and service words. Tech words come in just under the average at 46.6%, retail at 42.5%, crypto and gaming at about 41%.
Brand and gambling names expire, they are not taken down
Names with a brand word kept 40% and names with a gambling or adult word 39%. A registrar suspension would remove a name early, before its first renewal date. That happened to 5.7% of the brand names and 2.2% of the gambling names, against 3.4% of all names. The rest were registered for a year and left to expire.
How the shape of a name matters
| Name shape | Kept a year |
|---|---|
| Two words | 52% |
| 20 characters or more | 52% |
| Three words or more | 50% |
| Has a hyphen | 46% |
| One word | 43% |
| 8 characters or fewer | 42% |
| Has a digit | 37% |
| No dictionary word | 30% |
Two plain words did best at 52%. Short names and single words came in under the average, at 42% and 43%. Names with a digit kept 37%, and names with no dictionary word at all kept 30%.
Hot words keep fewer names
The 50 words that rose fastest in summer 2025 kept 37.8% of their new names, ten points under the average. Our word labels flag 7 of them as gambling words, and those kept 36.6%. The other 43 kept 38.3%, so gambling is not what pulls the hot words down: words that rise fast keep fewer of their new names either way.
| Gambling words (all 7) | Kept a year |
|---|---|
| bet | 36% |
| win | 39.4% |
| casino | 37.1% |
| slot | 33.8% |
| bahis | 43.6% |
| sekabet | 0.2% |
| betsson | 98.2% |
| Other hot words (the 10 with the most new names) | Kept a year |
|---|---|
| app | 38.7% |
| hub | 37.3% |
| get | 39.4% |
| game | 39.4% |
| vip | 34.5% |
| link | 50.2% |
| play | 41.6% |
| try | 28.7% |
| com | 36.5% |
| 777 | 31.4% |
A few hot words held up. labs kept 51% and link 50%, above the average, and betsson, a betting company’s own name, kept 98%. A rise in new names says a word is being registered; the keep-rate a year later says whether those registrations lasted.
What the kept names are used for
We looked up the name servers of 1,394 kept names from a random sample, and of 1,132 older names (registered before June 2025 and still active) to compare.
| Name servers today | Kept names | Older names |
|---|---|---|
| A platform host (Cloudflare, AWS, Vercel and others) | 33% | 21% |
| The registrar’s default name servers | 42% | 41% |
| Another host | 22% | 33% |
| A marketplace or parking page (for sale) | 3% | 6% |
A third of the kept names point at a platform host, more than the older names do. The largest group sits on the registrar’s default name servers, which says nothing about who holds the name or why. A marketplace’s name servers mark only some of the names for sale: many investors list a name without them. So a kept name is a name someone paid to renew, investor or business, and the data cannot tell which.
What the keep-rate does not tell you
Resale. We matched each word’s keep-rate with NameBio’s reported sales. The quarter of words with the lowest keep-rates had 6.8 reported sales per 10,000 .com names; the other three quarters had 8.5, 10.6 and 9.3. The average price stayed between $2,900 and $3,200 in every quarter. A high keep-rate does not mean names with the word sell better.
Drop catching. We followed every .com name that dropped from May to August 2026 and reached release.
| Dropped names with | Registered again |
|---|---|
| A word most owners let go | 18.4% |
| Weakest word about average | 15.9% |
| Every word kept by owners | 15.1% |
| No dictionary word | 25.6% |
The keep-rate of a dropped name’s words made no real difference. Names with no dictionary word, short letter strings and made-up names, were registered again most.
How to use this when you buy
- Use the keep-rate to skip the waves. Words whose names are let go most are also the words with the fewest reported sales per name; brand and gambling names are kept least of all the label groups. Check a word on its keyword page before you register.
- Treat a trending word with care until it holds. The trending words in our monthly reports and The Weekly are ranked by how far they sit above their own usual level, so one buyer registering a batch can’t push a word to the top. A year later, its keep-rate shows whether the rise lasted.
- Look at the topic. Real estate, health, travel, home, food and education names are renewed most, 54% to 58%; tech, retail, crypto and gaming names least among the large topics.
- For drops, look past the keep-rate. It does not predict which drops get caught. Among names of plain words, the Domaintile score does: 80% of the dropped names scoring 60 or more were taken again within months, against 22% of all dropped names.
- Check a name before you pay. The Breakdown gives any .com name the score with every point explained, an AI grade, each word’s keep-rate and its reported sales by position.
- Renew with a benchmark. My domains shows how other owners renew the words in your names, so you see which of your names sit in words most owners let go before they come up for renewal.
What share of new domain names do owners renew?
Of the 4,438,568 .com names added from 22 June to 1 August 2025, 47.7% were still with their owner a year later. Verisign puts first-year renewals in the mid-40s.
Which domain names are renewed most?
Names with real estate, health, travel, home, food and education words: 54% to 58% kept a year. Brand names (40%) and gambling words (39%) are renewed least, and they are left to expire rather than taken down.