What is a domain registration lookup?
It is a query to the official database that records who holds a domain name. Every domain ending has a registry behind it, and that registry keeps a record for every name registered under it. A lookup asks for that record and shows you what it says.
You may know this as a WHOIS lookup. Same job, newer plumbing. WHOIS was a plain text service that ICANN stopped requiring on 28 January 2025, and it has been replaced by RDAP, which returns properly structured data over a secure connection. This tool uses RDAP, which is why it can tell you things a WHOIS tool cannot, such as exactly which contact fields were hidden and by what method.
How do you look up a domain registration?
Type the domain into the box above and press the button. That is the whole thing.
You can paste in more or less anything and it will work out what you meant. A full web address like https://www.example.co.uk/pricing becomes example.co.uk. A subdomain is reduced to the part that is actually registered, and the result tells you when that happened so you are never reading about a different name than you thought. Names with accents or non-Latin characters are converted automatically and both forms are shown.
There is nothing to sign up for and no limit you will hit in normal use.
What information does a domain lookup show?
| Registrar | The company the domain was bought through, plus its IANA ID and abuse contact. |
|---|---|
| Creation date | When the name was first registered by anyone. |
| Expiry dates | Both of them. The registry date and the registrar date are separate fields and can differ. |
| Status codes | What the registry currently allows or blocks, including transfers and deletion. |
| Nameservers | The DNS servers on record at the registry. |
| DNSSEC | Whether the domain has a DS record published at its parent. |
| Contacts | Whatever is published, plus a list of exactly what was withheld and how. |
Why do the registry and the registrar say different things?
Because they are two different companies holding two different records, and this is the single most useful thing to understand about domain data.
The registry runs the ending. Verisign runs .com, Nominet runs .uk. There is exactly one per ending, and it is the authority on dates, status codes, nameservers and DNSSEC. The registrar is the company you bought the name from, and for most endings it is the only party holding contact details at all.
registrydates, status codes, nameservers, DNSSEC
registrarcontacts, redaction notice, its own expiry date
This tool asks both and labels which one said what. Most tools merge them into a single tidy block, which looks cleaner and hides the disagreements. The disagreements are often the interesting part, so when two dates do not match you see both, along with which one the registry will act on.
Why are there two expiry dates?
They are genuinely two separate fields, not one field spelled two ways. The registry expiry date is what the registry acts on when it decides to delete a name. The registrar expiry date is the registrar's own record of the same registration.
Usually they match. When they do not, it normally means a renewal has been processed at one end and has not reached the other yet. If you are working out how long you have, use the registry date, because that is the one with consequences.
What is the difference between last changed and last updated?
A record can show three dates that all sound like "last updated" and mean completely different things. Reading the wrong one is the most common mistake people make with this data.
| Record last changed | When the registry's stored data for this specific domain last changed. It does not say what changed. A nameserver edit, a renewal, a contact update and a transfer all move it. |
|---|---|
| Registry database updated | When the registry last refreshed its own published copy. This has nothing to do with your domain. It is usually today, which is exactly why people misread it as something having just changed. |
| Fetched | When this page retrieved the answer, which may have come from a short-lived cache. |
On one real domain those first two dates were seventeen days apart. Read the wrong line and you would conclude something changed this morning when nothing had changed in over two weeks.
Why is the owner information hidden?
For almost every generic ending it is gone, and it is not coming back. GDPR arrived in 2018, ICANN changed its rules to match, and registrant name, address, phone and email stopped being published across the board in a matter of months.
What replaced it is more useful than it sounds. Registrars now publish a structured list of exactly which fields they withheld and how, so the record tells you a phone number exists and was removed rather than staying silent about it. This tool reads that list and shows it as a table.
If you need to reach whoever is behind a domain, routes still exist, and the registrant lookup walks through them.
When would you use a domain lookup?
- Checking a domain before buying it. Creation date, expiry, status codes and transfer locks all change what you are actually getting.
- Working out why a site is down. A hold status explains a domain that resolves to nothing while looking perfectly registered.
- Judging whether an email or site is legitimate. A domain registered three weeks ago that claims twenty years of trading is worth a second look.
- Finding who to contact about abuse. The registrar and its abuse address are both in the record.
- Auditing domains you own. Expiry dates, transfer locks and nameservers in one place.
What a domain lookup cannot tell you
- Anything historical. This is the current state of the record. There is no previous owner, no old nameserver, no log of what changed last month. Tools that show you that built their own archive by saving daily copies over years.
- Who runs the website. The registrant of a domain is often not the person operating what is on it.
- Whether a domain is trustworthy. Recently registered is a signal worth noticing, not a verdict.
- Anything for endings with no registration service.Some endings publish nothing machine readable. You get a clear "cannot check" rather than a blank that looks like an answer, and the TLD directory lists which ones those are.
Is this lookup private?
The name you enter is sent to the registry and registrar that run that ending, because they hold the answer. There is no way around that part.
On this side, the registry's reply is kept briefly so repeated lookups do not hammer them, stored against the domain name and nothing else. Your IP address is used for a few minutes to stop one person overloading the tools and is never written next to a lookup. No history of who searched for what is kept, and nothing here is for sale that would give a reason to.
Related tools
For one specific part of the record there is a focused page for each: domain age, expiry and the deletion cycle, registrar and abuse contact, registrant details, and what each status code means. To check the registration and the live DNS together, use the domain report.