Verisign has released its Domain Name Industry Brief summarizing the results of the second quarter of 2026. According to the report, the global domain name market continues to expand. As of June 30, the total number of registered domain names surpassed 400 million for the first time, reaching 401.6 million. This represents an increase of 2.3 percent, or 9.1 million domain names, compared with the previous quarter, and 8.1 percent, or 29.9 million domain names, year over year.
Approximately one-third of this growth came from the .COM and .NET generic top-level domains, which are operated by Verisign. Together, these two domain extensions accounted for 179.1 million registrations. Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) reached 148.6 million registrations, up 1.6 percent (or 2.3 million domains) from the first quarter of 2026 and 3.6 percent (or 5.2 million domains) compared with the second quarter of the previous year.
New generic top-level domains (new gTLDs) totaled 52.9 million registrations in the second quarter: an increase of 6.7 percent (or 3.3 million names) quarter over quarter and 34 percent (or 13.4 million names) year over year.
Notably, the top 10 country-code domains by registration volume remained unchanged during the quarter. The Russian country-code domain .RU retained its fourth-place position. Among the new gTLDs, .VIP entered the top ten, replacing .SITE.
As for renewal rates, data are currently available only for the first quarter and only for registries that disclose such information. Based on these figures, the .UK country-code domain recorded the highest renewal rate among the ten largest domain extensions, at 81.6 percent, while .XYZ had the lowest, at 17.5 percent.
