The 2026 new TLD round, explained
ICANN just closed the first application window for new top-level domains since 2012. Here's how the round works, what happens next, and when you'll actually be able to register names on these things.
What just happened
ICANN accepted applications for new top-level domains between April 30 and August 12 this year. It's the first chance anyone has had to apply since 2012, and there probably won't be another for years. Applying isn't cheap: the evaluation fee alone is $227,000 per application, before lawyers, consultants, or a backend provider see a dime. Nobody spends that kind of money to reserve a maybe.
Here's the catch: ICANN won't say who applied for what until it publishes the whole list at once on Reveal Day, expected October 17. Until then, everything we know comes from applicants that announced their own plans. That's what the numbers below count, and they move as more applicants go public.
How the round works
Companies, registries, communities and brands filed applications to run new TLDs, at $227,000 apiece in evaluation fees. The list of who filed for what is sealed until October.
ICANN publishes every applied-for string and applicant at once. This is when the real contention sets come out, and when every announcement made beforehand gets confirmed or shot down.
ICANN checks the string (confusingly similar to an existing TLD? a protected term?), the applicant (background screening, financials), and the operations plan. One change from 2012: applicants have to use a registry service provider ICANN has already vetted, which should clear the biggest bottleneck from last time.
Third parties can formally object on legal rights, community, or public interest grounds. This is where trademark holders and communities get their shot at an application before it goes any further.
When more than one applicant wants the same string, there are exactly two ways out this round: a community applicant can win priority through Community Priority Evaluation, or the whole set goes to an ICANN auction. That's a big change from 2012, when most sets were settled privately. This time ICANN prohibits private resolution outright: no private auctions, no settlement agreements, no joint ventures, no paying a rival to withdraw. Applicants for the same string aren't even allowed to discuss it from Reveal Day until their set resolves.
The winner signs a registry agreement with ICANN, and the technical setup gets tested before anything goes live.
The TLD is added to the DNS root and becomes real. After that the registry runs sunrise for trademark holders, then early access, then general availability, on its own schedule.
A caveat on timing: ICANN publishes a process, not a schedule. The best guide is what actually happened last time, and last time was slow. Of the 1,235 strings the 2012 round delegated, not one made it into the root within a year of the window closing. The median took 2.9 years. The slowest, .kids, took 9.8. Map that pace onto this round's calendar and it looks like this.
The pre-vetted backend requirement should speed things up this round. Then again, this is ICANN we're talking about.
What 2012 teaches
The 2012 round drew 1,930 applications covering 1,408 unique strings. ICANN revealed the list in June 2012, the first new TLDs went live in October 2013, and 484 were in the root by the end of 2014.
The big money showed up in contention. When several applicants wanted the same string, they either worked it out privately or went to auction, and the auctions produced the biggest prices in the history of the namespace: .web sold for $135 million in July 2016. (The buyer still hasn't launched it.)
That playbook is dead now. In 2012, losing a private auction was itself a business: applicants who bowed out walked away with a share of the winning bid, and some filed with exactly that outcome in mind. This round, ICANN prohibits all of it. No private auctions, no settlements, no joint ventures, no compensation for withdrawing. If a contention set doesn't resolve through community priority, it goes to an ICANN auction, and nobody gets paid to lose.
Why this round is different
New TLDs got off to a rough start. Registrations grew quickly to about a fifth of .com's size by 2016, then went sideways for eight years. A lot of that early volume was penny promotions that never renewed.
That changed around 2023. New gTLDs hold 56 million registrations today, a third of .com's count, and the recent growth comes from extensions people actually use: .shop, .store, .online. Whatever you think of any individual application, this round is launching into the strongest demand new TLDs have ever seen.
It's also the first round of the AI era. Names on these TLDs will be typed by people and recommended by chatbots, and how AI reads a string is now part of what the string is worth. That's what our record tries to measure: one AI score per string, from the same fixed rubric, so every TLD gets judged on the same terms.
Between now and Reveal Day
Three things are worth watching. More applicants will announce themselves, and every announcement changes the known contention picture. Watch the categories, too: AI and tech strings are the biggest cluster on the record so far, which tells you where applicants think naming is headed. And then there's Reveal Day itself, when the sealed list replaces the announced one.
We update the record continuously. Every application is source-linked, every score is versioned, and corrections go in a public changelog. When ICANN publishes the official list, we'll diff it against everything above, in public.