.volunteer
Is .volunteer a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .volunteer in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. Public Interest Registry named .volunteer as the replacement string of its .cause application.
A clear, friendly word for nonprofit and civic projects, but most groups will keep their main address on .org and use it as a side door.
nonprofits, volunteer-matching platforms, civic and municipal programs, faith groups, and event organizers that want a plain-language address for recruiting helpers
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: an open, unrestricted common noun from the nonprofit sector sold to the same thin buyer pool of causes and mission organizations, where the string's value rests on a sector that signals mission readily but registers domains sparingly and rarely abandons its .org identity.
Also a plain nonprofit-sector generic aimed at the same cause-side buyer, but it names the legal entity a grantmaker already is — so it can carry a primary identity, whereas .volunteer names an activity the organization runs and is more likely to sit beside the main site than replace it.
The closest match on grammatical job rather than institution: a gerund for the nonprofit act, bought as a campaign or program suffix hung off a brand (give.acme / acme.giving) rather than as anyone's primary identity, which is the same secondary-use ceiling .volunteer faces.
What a .volunteer domain is
.volunteer 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 .volunteer in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .volunteer domain extension real yet?
.volunteer 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 .volunteer domain?
You can’t yet. ICANN publishes every applied-for string on Reveal Day, 7 October 2026 at 18:00 UTC. A .volunteer name can only be registered after that, once the string is delegated and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .volunteer was .charity, delegated on 7 June 2018.
Is .volunteer a real TLD?
Not yet. .volunteer is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .volunteer as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Public Interest Registry · first recordedICANN
“PIR2624T-T82034 · Public Interest Registry · replacement string of .cause”ICANN
- Band chosen: 30-49, usable but limited. The string is a real, widely understood English word with an obvious use case: a volunteer-recruitment front door for a charity, a city program, a disaster-response effort, or a volunteer-matching marketplace (name.volunteer reads naturally in a call to action). The applicant on the record, Public Interest Registry, filed it as a standard application and as the replacement string for its primary .cause application; stated neutrally, an operator already established in the nonprofit namespace could plausibly place the string alongside its existing offerings at registrars, which supports adoption likelihood. It is not in the 50-69 band because, by analogy (flagged as analogy), descriptive nonprofit-sector strings such as .ngo, .charity, .foundation and .gives have tended to see modest, low-volume adoption with little aftermarket, and their registrants overwhelmingly keep primary identity on .org; .volunteer would mostly be a redirect or campaign address rather than the identity a serious organization builds on. It is not in the 10-29 band because demand is not joke- or event-driven: volunteer recruitment is a continuous, sector-wide activity, so a trickle of genuine, sustained use is likely over the next 5 years, and the word carries a positive, trust-neutral signal rather than a vanity one. Main market uncertainty: whether any volunteer-matching platform or large civic program adopts a .volunteer address as its primary identity (which would pull the score toward the top of the band) versus the sector treating it purely as a campaign redirect, which would hold it near the bottom. Registration volume, pricing, and renewal figures are unknown.