How Much Should You Pay for an Expired Domain? Price Benchmarks
Expired domain pricing looks chaotic from the outside: the same day's listings hold $5 closeouts and five-figure curated names. The chaos is mostly structure. Price tracks the channel you buy through first, then the metrics, the TLD and the brand quality of the name itself. Here are the benchmarks that hold as of mid-2026, and the sanity checks to run before any specific price gets your money.
What do expired domains cost in 2026?
| Channel | Typical price | What you are buying | Example venues |
|---|---|---|---|
| Closeouts | $5-15 | Unsold auction stock at fixed, falling prices | GoDaddy closeouts; Dynadot ladder ($30/$15/$5) |
| Quiet expiry auctions | $12-50 | Names with zero or one competing bidder | GoDaddy Auctions, Namecheap Market |
| Uncontested backorders | $13-99 | A catch nobody else ordered | DropCatch $13-59; NameJet/SnapNames $69-79; park.io $99 |
| Contested auctions | $50-500, four figures for strong profiles | Names several vetted buyers want | DropCatch auctions, GoDaddy, Sedo ($79 minimums) |
| Curated marketplaces | $1,500-5,000, premium to $50,000+ | Aged domains with the vetting done for you | Odys Global |
| Reseller marketplaces | Ask prices, huge range | Investor inventory at retail | Afternic, Sedo, Flippa |
The pattern behind the table: you pay for other buyers' attention. The moment a second bidder shows up, $12 becomes $50. The moment a curator vets a name and lists it, $60 of catch fees become $2,000 of retail. Choosing your channel is choosing your price band, which is why where you buy matters as much as what you buy.
The bands from the table on a log price scale: each buying channel is its own market, and curated inventory sits an order of magnitude above the auction bands.
What does the sales data say?
NameBio, the reference database for recorded domain sales, logged roughly 190,300 sales worth $244 million or more in 2025, up 31.9% year over year, with the first half alone clearing $122 million. Divide those totals and the mean recorded sale lands near $1,280, but that mean is hauled upward by a thin top end of reported outliers: AI.com at about $70 million (April 2025), Voice.com at $30 million, Chat.com at $15.5 million, Icon.com at $12 million. Two more numbers frame the market: NameBio captures an estimated 5-10% of retail activity, so treat it as a large sample rather than a census, and ccTLD sales grew 61% in 2025, worth knowing if you shop outside .com.
Do TLDs change the math?
Meaningfully. The .ai boom is the extreme case: the extension grew from about 40,000 registrations in 2020 to roughly 859,000 by August 2025, expired .ai names sell through official Namecheap auctions rather than free-dropping, and single months have cleared $600,000 in expired .ai sales, so budget expectations built on .com simply do not transfer. .io prices on startup demand, with about 18% of Y Combinator startups using one. At the other end, most of the 145.6 million ccTLD and 47.8 million new-gTLD registrations resell at a discount to .com, when they resell at all. Benchmark inside the TLD you are buying, never across the whole market.
What actually moves the price?
- Inspected links, not scores. Real editorial backlinks are the core premium. Authority scores for the same site differ by about 26 points on average between tools, so informed bidders pay for links they opened by hand, not for a number.
- TLD. .com carries the deepest resale market, with 161 million registrations as of Q4 2025; .ai and .io run hot niche economies of their own, and most other extensions price at a discount.
- Length and brandability. Short, pronounceable, dictionary-adjacent names price like brands even with zero backlinks.
- Traffic and revenue. A domain with genuine type-in traffic or income prices on multiples of that income, not on SEO metrics.
- Age and continuity. Expiry-auction names keep their original registration; dropped names reset it. Identical metrics should not mean identical prices.
- Venue mechanics. Soft-close auctions stretch endings and squeeze snipers, seller commissions of 15-25% at the big houses shape ask prices, and curation adds a service markup on top of the name itself.
How do you sanity-check a specific price?
Four moves, in order. Pull comparable sales on NameBio for the same keyword family, length and TLD. Cross-check the metrics in two tools, per our pre-purchase checklist. Total the lifetime cost, including renewal and any buyer-side fees. Then set a walk-away number before the auction starts, because soft close is designed to make you forget it. Research platforms like DomCop put live auctions next to SEO metrics from several vendors, which helps you compare the whole field instead of falling in love with one listing.
One warning about automated appraisals: tools that estimate a domain's value routinely disagree with each other by multiples, and the trade press has repeatedly documented how inconsistent they are. Treat an appraisal as one noisy opinion, never as a price floor, and never as a reason to outbid your walk-away number.
An illustrative example of the full routine: suppose a 14-year-old .com shows an authority score of 38 in one tool and 19 in another, has twelve live referring domains and a clean archive, and comparable two-word .coms have sold at $150-400. The 19-point metric gap says trust the inspected links, not the scores; the comps say a soft-close chase past $500 is already overpaying. Writing down a $250 walk-away number before bidding is the entire discipline.
When is paying more rational?
Three situations justify the top of a range. First, an exact brand match for a funded business: renaming a company usually costs more than the domain would. Second, verified traffic or revenue, priced from data the seller can prove rather than promise. Third, when the domain is the project: for a one-domain rebuild where a bad pick costs months, one vetted $2,000 purchase can beat ten $60 gambles. The reverse also holds. For volume SEO experiments and learning, the cheap channels exist precisely so mistakes cost $15, and the buying process is identical at every price.
Frequently asked questions
What is a fair price for a first expired domain?
Between $5 and $100. Closeouts and quiet auctions teach the mechanics while capping the downside, and at that price a mistake is tuition, not a loss. Contested auctions and curated marketplaces reward buyers who already have a vetting routine.
Why do two similar-looking domains sell for wildly different prices?
Because one was inspected and the other only measured. Two names with the same headline authority score can differ by an entire link profile: one has live editorial links and a clean archive, the other has directory spam and a casino era. The 26-point average spread between metric tools hides exactly this difference.
Are automated appraisal tools accurate?
No. Different appraisal tools value the same domain inconsistently, and industry reviews keep finding the same problem. Use recorded comparable sales on NameBio or DNJournal instead; real transactions beat modeled guesses.
Do expired domains cost more than fresh registrations?
Usually, because you are paying for history. But 200,000 or more names delete daily, and anything the catchers ignore can be hand-registered at the standard $10-15 fee. The premium only exists where a second buyer sees the same value you do.
Is a $5 closeout ever actually good?
Occasionally, yes. With 200,000 or more deletions a day and 35,000+ new expiring names daily at GoDaddy alone, decent names slip through every day. The realistic expectation is a usable brandable or a modest link profile, found through volume and a fast vetting routine.