.heritage
Is .heritage a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody is chasing .heritage, as of 7 October 2026. One applicant claimed it and is out. We keep the entry on the record either way.
- Journey To The West
A dignified word for museums, trusts and old family brands, but most such groups already live on .org or .com and rarely switch.
cultural institutions, preservation trusts, heritage-tourism operators, genealogy services, and long-established "heritage" consumer brands wanting a descriptive label
In Journey To The West's published portfolio of 323 strings submitted in the ICANN 2026 round. Their catalog line: “Passed down, and worth preserving.”
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 warm legacy-and-remembrance abstract noun sold as an open generic to a small but deeply identity-bearing set of institutions plus the many businesses already carrying the word in their name, where the whole thesis rests on sentiment being strong enough to move a primary identity onto it.
Also a values-laden kinship noun whose likely registrants are genealogy and ancestry services, community institutions, and companies using the word as a trust signal, but it is a far broader everyday word with a much larger addressable base.
Same mission-sector-noun bet, where credibility depends on nonprofit and institutional registrants putting real identity on the string rather than defensively parking it, though it names a funding activity where heritage names a cultural asset.
What a .heritage domain is
.heritage is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. Nobody is chasing .heritage today. The applicants that claimed it are out.
Is the .heritage domain extension real yet?
.heritage is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .heritage domain?
You can’t yet. A .heritage name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .heritage was .memorial, delegated on 26 November 2014.
Is .heritage a real TLD?
Not yet. .heritage is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because an applicant claimed .heritage and is no longer in it. We keep the entry, and every entry on this page links to its source.
- Journey To The West · now abandonedICANN
- Journey To The West · first recordedJourney To The West Corporation
“.heritage · Brand & Heritage · “Passed down, and worth preserving.””Journey To The West Corporation
- I place .heritage in the 10-29 vanity/narrow band. The word is meaningful and positively coded, but the natural constituency (museums, trusts, preservation bodies, heritage sites) is institutionally conservative and already anchored on .org and country-code domains; by analogy, culture-sector strings like .museum and .art saw adoption concentrated in campaign or secondary use rather than primary identity, with .museum in particular remaining tiny despite direct sector fit (analogy, no figures asserted). It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no plausible volume or price-driven registration engine and the aftermarket for an 8-letter descriptive suffix would likely be thin over the next 5 years; it is above 1-9 because heritage tourism, genealogy services, and 'heritage brand' marketing form a real if shallow demand pool. The applicant is one of a large portfolio of submitted strings, which says nothing negative but suggests no single-sector anchor tenant is driving this application. My main market uncertainty: whether heritage-positioned consumer brands (luxury, food, craft) treat name.heritage as a storytelling namespace for campaigns, which could lift it toward the top of the band.