.leo
Is .leo a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.leo is contested: 2 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. They are Juming and Amazon.
A short, friendly name-word with several meanings, but few serious projects would pick a .leo address as their main identity.
people and small businesses named Leo, zodiac and lifestyle brands, and space or satellite projects playing on the LEO (low-earth-orbit) acronym, plus speculators chasing a short three-letter string
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 short, high-frequency personal given name with no category meaning, so the registry is wagering that a large population of same-named individuals will put their own identity on the right of the dot rather than that any industry will adopt it.
Also a common first name standing alone as a string, carrying the same ambiguity as .leo — it can be run as an open personal-identity namespace or locked up as one owner's private brand asset, and nothing in the word itself decides which.
A given name as the string, but the bet leans the other way: its value comes from one house already owning the name commercially, so it is closer to a single-registrant brand play than to .leo's open-name wager.
What a .leo domain is
.leo is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. 2 applications for it are on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .leo domain extension real yet?
.leo 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 .leo domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .leo name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .leo was .kim, delegated on 23 January 2014.
Is .leo a real TLD?
Not yet. .leo is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .leo is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
“ARSI2666T-T15666 · Amazon Registry Services, Inc. · primary · contention set 2026-134 TL2645T-T79897 · TechEdge Limited · primary · contention set 2026-134”ICANN
“TL2645T-T29492 · TechEdge Limited · replacement string of .gem · Deactivated XL2625T-T40935 · XYZ.COM LLC · primary”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow), near its top. The string .leo carries several meanings at once - a common given name, the zodiac sign, Latin for lion, a frequent business-name element, and the LEO acronym used for low-earth-orbit satellites - which gives it more memorability than a pure joke string. But none of those meanings describes a category of buyer who needs the suffix: by analogy with how personal-name and mood-word TLDs have behaved, a person called Leo, a Leo-branded shop, or a satellite startup would typically treat a .leo address as a vanity or redirect domain rather than a primary identity. It is not in the 30-49 band because there is no evident volume driver beyond price-led speculation and the brand signal to an outsider is weak; a .leo address needs explaining in most contexts. It is not in the 1-9 band because the string is short, pronounceable, positive in connotation, and has at least three distinct demand pockets (name, zodiac/culture, space-tech) that could produce sustained low-level registrations over the next 5 years. On the record there are 2 applications in one contention set - one filed as a brand application by Amazon Registry Services, Inc., one as a standard application by TechEdge Limited (Juming); the TLD is scored here as generally available regardless. My main market uncertainty is whether the LEO space acronym matures into a recognised namespace for satellite and space-industry companies within 5 years; registration volumes, pricing and aftermarket sales for comparable name-word TLDs are unknown to me here, so the band placement rests on analogy.