.budapest
Is .budapest a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.budapest is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is ISZT.
A hometown address for Budapest businesses and projects; useful locally, but most Hungarian sites will still choose .hu or .com.
local businesses, venues, cultural institutions and city services in Budapest that want a visibly local web address, plus a small set of tourism and real-estate sites marketing the city
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same bet: a Central European capital's own endonym, where the city's institutions and local SMEs are the primary identity-holders and the addressable market is capped by one mid-size national language community rather than global demand.
Same bet: a single-city geographic string in a smaller non-English-speaking capital, viable only if a civic/municipal anchor tenant plus local business pride carries it, since no international buyer wants the name.
Same bet: a European capital name serving as a civic identity namespace for residents, local firms and city bodies, with the same dependency on municipal sponsorship and local-language loyalty for its registration base.
What a .budapest domain is
.budapest is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Places. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .budapest domain extension real yet?
.budapest is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .budapest domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .budapest name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .budapest was .wien, delegated on 3 January 2014.
Is .budapest a real TLD?
Not yet. .budapest is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .budapest is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- ISZT · first recordedICANN
“MIST2660T-T52370 · Magyarországi Internet Szolgáltatók Tanácsa Tudományos Egyesület · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49 (usable but limited). City TLDs from the 2012 round are the closest analogy, and by analogy their pattern has been modest: a launch bump driven by local promotion and defensive registrations, then a long plateau in which a minority of names resolve to genuine local businesses, restaurants, venues and civic sites, with the aftermarket largely confined to a handful of generic city-keyword names. Budapest is a large capital with a real local economy and tourism draw, so the string has a clear, bounded buyer group (geo first, then commerce and culture), which is why it is not in the vanity band below: a Budapest restaurant or gallery using it as its primary identity is a plausible, serious use rather than a joke. It is not in the strong-niche band above because adoption would have to be explained against a very strong incumbent: Hungarian organisations have a well-established national ccTLD habit, and the language-specific audience caps the pool compared with city TLDs serving English- or German-speaking markets, which by analogy themselves stayed thin. The record shows a single confirmed applicant, a Hungarian internet-industry association (stated neutrally from the record), which by analogy with other association- or municipality-backed city TLDs suggests an institutional, local-promotion model rather than a volume or discount-registrar model; that tends to favour steady, modest, genuine use over price-driven volume, but not a large aftermarket. Registration volumes, pricing and any municipal endorsement are unknown. Main market uncertainty: whether Budapest's local businesses treat a city suffix as a credibility signal worth switching to, or as a redundant second address kept alongside .hu, over the next 5 years.