How does a domain transfer work?
Five steps, and most of the pain is in the first two.
- Unlock the domain at your current registrar.
- Get the authorization code, sometimes called an EPP code or auth code.
- Start the transfer at the registrar you are moving to and pay for it.
- Approve the confirmation email sent to the registrant address on record.
- Wait. Registries allow the losing registrar up to five days to respond.
A transfer normally includes a year's renewal in the price, so the expiry date moves forward rather than resetting to today.
Why is my domain transfer blocked?
Usually one of four things, and the check above tells you which. The important split is between locks your registrar set and locks the registry set, because that decides whether this takes two minutes or two weeks.
clientTransferProhibited | Your registrar's standard lock. It is on most domains by default, it is good for security, and there is a switch in your account that turns it off. |
|---|---|
serverTransferProhibited | The registry set this. A dispute, a court order, registry policy, or a high-security lock you may have requested yourself. You cannot remove it and your registrar has to find out why. |
| Recently registered | ICANN policy locks a newly registered domain against transfer for a period. Currently 60 days. |
| Recently transferred | The same lock applies after each move between registrars. |
What is the 60 day transfer lock?
ICANN policy stops a domain being transferred for 60 days after it is first registered, and again for 60 days after each transfer between registrars. There is also a lock after a change of registrant, which no public tool can see because registrant changes are not published anywhere.
This is currently changing. The GNSO Council approved a reform on 12 March 2025 and the ICANN Board adopted it on 7 June 2026, shortening the locks to 30 days and removing the change of registrant lock entirely. It has not taken effect yet: an implementation review team has to draft the policy language first, and no effective date has been published. The check above uses the rule genuinely in force today, and it will not print a specific future date on which a lock lifts, because registrars measure the clock from different starting points and the policy is mid-change.
Will transferring a domain take my site down?
It can, in two specific ways, and both are avoidable if you know about them beforehand. This is the part people find out afterwards.
DNS hosting. A transfer moves the registration, not your DNS. If your current registrar is also serving your zone, those records can disappear when the domain leaves, and the website and email go with them. Move DNS to its new home first, confirm it is answering, then transfer.
DNSSEC. If the domain is signed, the DS record has to be handled at both ends. Getting it wrong means the domain stops resolving entirely for anyone using a validating resolver, which is a total outage rather than a partial one. Check the state of the chain with the DNSSEC chain checker before you start.
What can this check not see?
Everything that lives in your registrar account rather than the public record, and any one of these can stop a transfer even when the checks above all pass.
- Whether you can actually get the authorization code.
- Whether the registrant email still works. Approval goes there, and an abandoned address is the single most common reason a transfer stalls.
- Unpaid balances or unverified contact details on the account.
- Whether a change of registrant happened recently.
Before starting a transfer, check the registrant email on file is one you can read. That one thing prevents most failed transfers.
Do country domains transfer the same way?
No. Everything above is ICANN policy for generic endings. .uk, .de and .nl each run their own process with their own authorization mechanism and timings, and none of the locks described here apply to them.
For those, the registry's own documentation is the source worth reading. .uk transfers work by changing a tag rather than using an auth code, which surprises people coming from .com.
Related tools
The status codes reference explains every lock in full. The registrar lookup gives you contact details for the registrar you are leaving, and the domain registration lookup shows the whole record.