My domain expired. How long do I have, and how do I get it back?

If your domain expired, log in to your registrar today and renew it. For weeks after the expiry date the name is still yours to recover: first as an ordinary renewal, then for a 30-day redemption window with a restore fee. After that it goes back on the open market, and getting it back means competing with strangers for it.

The rules for that window are not a registrar's mood. For .com and the other generic domains they come from ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy; for .ca they come from CIRA. Below is what each set of rules lets you do, day by day, and the order I would do things in if the site and the inbox both went quiet this morning.

Is my domain expired, or is something else down?

Two signs point at the domain. Your website and your business email stopped on the same day, and the address now shows either "server not found" or a registrar page saying the name has expired. ICANN requires that parking page to say the registration expired and how to renew it. Anything else is probably a different layer.

To be sure in two minutes, look the name up. ICANN Lookup shows the expiry date, the registrar and the current status for a .com; for a .ca, CIRA's own search on cira.ca does the same. If the expiry date is in the future, the domain is fine and you want the full website-down triage instead of this page.

How long do I have to get an expired domain back?

For a .ca, CIRA's timeline is up to 45 days of auto-renew grace, then 30 days of redemption, and the name lands on the release list 32 to 78 days after expiry. For a .com, the registrar decides when to delete it, then a 30-day redemption period and about 5 days of pending delete follow.

Notice what the .com column does not promise: a fixed number of days before deletion. ICANN's policy says registrars "may delete registrations at any time after they expire", as long as the DNS cut-off and the notices happen. That is why your registrar's own terms matter, and why "I'll deal with it next week" is a worse plan for a .com than it sounds.

What does my domain's status mean?

The status line in the lookup tells you which stage you are in and who can still fix it. Lookup tools spell the codes with spaces, such as "redemption period"; ICANN's documentation writes the same code as redemptionPeriod. Find yours in the table and do what the right-hand column says.

One status is missing from that table on purpose: no record at all. If the lookup says the name is not registered, it has already been released, and the first person to buy it gets it. If that is you, buy it now and read the rest later.

How do I renew a domain that already expired?

Find the registrar in the lookup, log in to that account, renew from the domain list, and pay. During redemption, ask the registrar to restore the name, because a normal renewal button will not cover it. Then confirm the site and email resolve again, which the registrar must allow "immediately or as soon as is commercially reasonable".

1. Find out who your registrar is. The lookup shows it. It is often not the company that built your site, and sometimes not the company that sends you the hosting invoice either.
2. Log in to the registrar account. If you never had a login, the domain may be registered in someone else's account. ICANN's policy gives the recovery rights to the registered name holder at the moment of expiry, so if that is your former designer, the registrar will deal with them, not you. Who owns your website covers how to fix that for good.
3. Renew the domain, and only the domain. Checkout pages love to add privacy upgrades, a site builder and three "matching" names to the cart. You came for one line. Renew for several years while you are there; CIRA allows up to 10 years for a .ca.
4. If the status is redemption period, ask for a restore. ICANN requires registrars to publish their renewal, post-expiration and restore fees on their website, so find the fee page before you call and you will know the number before they say it.
5. Confirm DNS is back. ICANN's notes allow a delay when the restore needs a manual step or lands on a holiday. Check the next morning before you assume anything.

What happens to my email and my Google rankings while it is down?

Both depend on DNS, so both stop. Your mailbox and the messages already in it are untouched, but new mail cannot find your server while the domain is off. Google treats DNS errors like server errors, and says unreachable pages already in its index "will be removed from Google's index within days".

That second sentence, from Google's guide to network and DNS errors, is the real reason a lapsed domain is urgent even if nobody visits your site on a Tuesday. A week of "server not found" can undo pages that took months to get indexed. After the renewal, Googlebot has to recrawl them before they can come back; how long Google takes to index a page gives you a realistic idea of that wait, and the Pages report in Search Console shows you when they return.

Email is the quieter loss. A sender's mail server may keep retrying for a while and deliver late, or give up and bounce the message back to the sender. Either way, you have no list of who tried. Ask your regular customers and suppliers whether anything bounced that week, and read why emails go undelivered if mail still misbehaves after the domain is back.

Why didn't I get the expiry warnings?

You probably did, at an address you do not read. Registrars must send the notices to the registered name holder at the contact on file, about a month and a week before expiry. If that contact is an old employee's mailbox, a designer's email, or an address on the expiring domain itself, the warnings arrived exactly where nobody looks.

• Check the contact email on the domain in your registrar account today. It should be an address you read every day, on a different domain.
• Save the registrar's sending address as a safe sender. ICANN's policy notes suggest registrars tell you that address so the reminders don't end up filtered as spam.
• Check the card on file. Auto-renew on a card that expired last spring is the same as no auto-renew.
• Put the expiry date in your own calendar, a month ahead. It costs nothing, and it is the only reminder that does not depend on someone else's email.

If the domain was registered by a web designer who has since gone quiet, those reminders went to them, and so will the next ones. What to do when your web designer stops replying walks through getting the account moved into your name.

Somebody else registered my expired domain. Now what?

Before release, a .ca can be backordered; CIRA suggests it if you used the name actively, with no guarantee it works. Once someone else owns it, you can offer to buy it, choose a new name, or, if they took it in bad faith over your trademark, ask a lawyer about a dispute.

The disputes have names, the UDRP for .com and CIRA's CDRP for .ca, and both are about bad-faith registrations, not about who had the name first. Whether you have a case is a question for a lawyer, not for me; I build websites. The practical route for most small businesses is a new domain, chosen with the checks in how to choose a domain name, and every place the old address was printed updated in one afternoon: Google Business Profile, invoices, vehicle lettering, social profiles.

Frequently asked questions

Sources, read on 2 October 2026: ICANN Expired Registration Recovery Policy (updated 21 February 2024) for the notices, the DNS interruption, the 30-day redemption grace period, the transfer block, the fee disclosure and the GNSO best practices; ICANN — EPP Status Codes: What Do They Mean for every status in the table; CIRA — About To Be Released and CIRA — Your domain name expired. What now? for the .ca timeline; Google — Debug network and DNS errors for Google's crawlers for what happens to indexed pages.