.personal
Is .personal a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .personal in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. index Internet und Mediaforschung GmbH named .personal as the replacement string of its .stiftung application.
A long, generic word for personal sites; individuals mostly keep choosing shorter or established options, so demand looks shallow.
individuals who want a home page, portfolio or email address that reads as "mine, not my employer's", plus a small set of personal-data and privacy-themed services
No applications recorded for this TLD yet.
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 as .personal: an unowned, abstract English word with no category behind it, sold on the hope that individuals and identity-minded registrants will hang their own primary name on a warm adjective-ish generic rather than on a word that names a product or trade.
Its entire value proposition is a person declaring "this is me" to the left of the dot, the same first-person identity job .personal is betting on, with the same buyer (an individual, not a business) and the same requirement that people accept a non-.com namespace for themselves; it is narrower only because it carries a language.
A vague personal-sphere modifier with no concrete thing it names, so like .personal it has to manufacture its own use case and hope registrants read themselves into the word, but it skews toward publishers and marketers rather than individuals putting their own identity on it.
What a .personal domain is
.personal is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, filed under Culture. Nobody has applied for .personal in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .personal domain extension real yet?
.personal 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 .personal domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .personal name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .personal was .life, delegated on 15 May 2014.
Is .personal a real TLD?
Not yet. .personal is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .personal as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- index Internet und Mediaforschung GmbH · first recordedICANN
“IIUM2696T-T27855 · index Internet und Mediaforschung GmbH · replacement string of .stiftung”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow), at its top. The string is a plain English adjective describing a use case rather than naming a place, product or community. By analogy (flagged as analogy): earlier TLDs aimed at individuals had mixed outcomes — a short, friendly ccTLD repurposed for personal identity found genuine primary-identity use, while a longer dedicated personal-identity TLD from an earlier round saw thin uptake and little aftermarket. .personal is on the long side and reads awkwardly after a name ("jane.personal"), which by analogy tends to push buyers toward the established alternatives they already recognize. There is a plausible secondary use around personal email and privacy-positioned services, but that is a small niche rather than a category where this TLD would become the default. Not in the band above (30-49) because I see no price-driven volume channel or category where it would be registered at scale rather than by occasional enthusiasts; not in the band below (1-9) because the word is universally understood, inoffensive and could carry a modest number of real personal sites. On the record: one standard application, filed as a replacement string for .stiftung by index Internet und Mediaforschung GmbH; contention count 0; no category tag. Main market uncertainty: whether individuals in the next 5 years actually want a dedicated personal-identity namespace at all, or whether that demand stays absorbed by social profiles, generic TLDs and short identity-flavored ccTLDs.