.de

Register a .de domain

Germany's country code, run by the cooperative DENIC eG in Frankfurt. Open to holders anywhere since the local-presence rule was dropped in May 2018, but DENIC checks your nameservers before it will register the name.

Extension type: Country-code (ccTLD)
Who can register: Open to anyone
Registry: DENIC eG
Renews at: On request

Check a .de name

.de pricing

Live pricing is temporarily unavailable for .de.

Live pricing is temporarily unavailable. Search the name you want, or ask us and we will quote it.

Before you register .de

What the price includes: Every .de amount on this page is resolved by the same pricing engine that charges your cart, at the moment the page is built. There is no separate ICANN fee, agency fee or surcharge added later — the figure you see is the figure you pay, in the currency shown.
Premium and reserved names: Some names are classed as premium by the registry and priced individually, usually at the premium rate every year rather than only the first. Search the exact name to see its own quote. If a name's premium status or price changes between your quote and your purchase, the quote is invalidated rather than quietly repriced.
Renewal is not automatic unless you switch it on: Auto-renew is off unless you enable it, and enabling it sets a flag at the registry rather than scheduling a charge here. We email the registrant address before a name expires, so keep a monitored address on the record. If a .de name does lapse, restoring it costs considerably more than renewing it would have — the restore price is in the table above.
Transfers: Transferring .de to us needs the AuthInfo (EPP) code from your current registrar, which they are obliged to give you on request. Where the registry operates a waiting period before a name may move — ICANN imposes one on generic extensions — it is set out in the facts above. That is registry policy, not ours, and we cannot waive it.

Eligibility

Open to anyone, with a German contact only on demand

Registry: DENIC eG, Frankfurt am Main, a registered cooperative operating .de for its members.

There is no residency, address or company-registration requirement. Since 25 May 2018 a .de name can be held by a person or entity anywhere in the world, and DENIC's own 2025 statistics put 12.2 per cent of the register, roughly 2.15 million names, in the hands of holders outside Germany.
The old administrative contact is gone. DENIC stopped recording an Admin-C in May 2018 on data-minimisation grounds under the GDPR, so the widely repeated rule that a .de needs an administrative contact resident in Germany no longer describes the registry.
What replaced it is conditional. Under section 3(4) of DENIC's Domain Terms and Conditions, a holder not domiciled in Germany must name an authorised representative in Germany for the service of official and court documents within two weeks of a DENIC request, and DENIC only issues that request when a third party asserting a right applies to serve documents. Openprovider offers a trustee address for holders who would rather have one standing by.
The surprise at ordering time is technical rather than legal: DENIC checks the nameservers before it registers or transfers a name, so the zone must already exist and answer authoritatively. A .de is not a name you can buy first and point somewhere later.

What DENIC is, and why .de behaves differently

DENIC eG is a registered cooperative in Frankfurt am Main whose members are the providers that sell .de names, and it runs the registry without the intention of making a profit rather than under an ICANN registry agreement. The consequence for a buyer is that the habits carried over from .com do not transfer. There is no auto-renew grace period, no 60-day transfer lock, and the contract that actually governs the name is between you and DENIC directly, not between DENIC and your provider.

That direct contract is the detail worth understanding, because it is what makes .de unusually hard to lose by accident and unusually confusing when something goes wrong. Cancelling the service agreement with a hosting company does not cancel the domain contract with DENIC. The provider simply stops administering the name, DENIC picks it up, and the holder starts receiving letters from Frankfurt about a domain they thought they had given up. Nothing is broken when that happens; it is the system working as designed, and the fix is either a provider transfer to us or a deletion request.

Three states people confuse, and how we handle each

A .de that stops working is in one of three quite different states. If it was deleted, it is in the Redemption Grace Period and can be taken back until the 31st day, which is the closest thing .de has to a gTLD redemption. If your provider walked away, it is in TRANSIT, still resolving, waiting for you to answer a letter. If DENIC could not verify the holder data, it has been taken out of the zone under the BSI Act obligations and you have 83 days to complete verification through your provider before the contract ends. That last case is the one with no safety net: the Domain Guidelines specifically exclude a termination for unverifiable holder data from the Redemption Grace Period, so there is nothing to restore afterwards.

As a reseller our job is to keep you out of the third case and to act quickly in the first two. That means submitting a holder record DENIC can verify at the outset rather than a placeholder, keeping the postal address current because TRANSIT letters go by post, and passing on verification requests the day they arrive rather than at the end of the month. We cannot verify anything on DENIC's behalf and we cannot extend a DENIC deadline, but almost every .de lost in practice is lost to an unopened letter rather than to a policy.

Terms and lifecycle

What holding a .de actually commits you to

Term and renewal: The domain contract with DENIC is concluded for an indefinite period and the holder may terminate it at any time without notice, under section 7(1) of the Domain Terms and Conditions. There is no registry expiry date to miss; what we bill is an annual service period against that open-ended contract.
If you miss the renewal: DENIC does have a redemption period, contrary to a common belief. Under point III of the Domain Guidelines a deleted name enters a Redemption Grace Period lasting until a randomly chosen moment on the 31st day after the registration ceased, during which only the last holder, or a third party they nominate, can take it back. Openprovider gives us a 29-day window to restore from its side, and the restore price shown above is far above a renewal.
Transfer between providers: Transfers run on the provider transfer password, the AuthInfo. A password issued by DENIC is valid for 30 days and can be used once; Openprovider's own outgoing codes are valid for 14 days. There is no ICANN-style 60-day lock on .de, so a name registered yesterday can move today, but the receiving zone must pass DENIC's nameserver check or the transfer completes without the data being applied.
TRANSIT is not a redemption period: If your provider stops administering the name rather than deleting it, the domain passes to DENICdirect and DENIC writes to the holder by post with a TRANSIT password and a deadline. The name keeps working. Inside that deadline you can transfer it to a new provider or delete it at no cost to you; if nothing happens, DENIC terminates the contract under section 7(2)(k). Treat TRANSIT as a rescue rope, not a grace period, and note the letter goes to the postal address on file.
Registrant data and verification: Since NIS2 was transposed into the BSI Act, DENIC is legally obliged to keep holder data accurate and checks it against external sources. Full name with legal form, postal address, telephone number and email are all mandatory, and data of holders that are not natural persons is published in the DENIC webwhois. If a check fails, DENIC's own published deadlines are 5 days to complete verification through your provider, then removal from the .de zone, then 83 days to put it right before the contract ends.

Fit

Who .de is for

Selling into Germany
For a German customer .de is the address they guess before they search, and DENIC counted around 17.7 million of them at the end of 2025. Nothing else reads as local in that market.
Swiss and Austrian firms with German customers
Foreign holders are the growth in .de rather than a curiosity. Of the names held outside Germany, DENIC puts 7.7 per cent in Austria and 4.8 per cent in Switzerland, and no trustee or local entity is needed to join them.
Not for a name you want to park first
DENIC will not register or transfer a name whose nameservers do not already answer authoritatively. If you want to reserve an idea and decide later, a gTLD registers with no zone at all and is the easier buy.

One address for the whole single market

A German company already meets the .eu eligibility test, and an .eu name covers customers in every member state without registering a country code in each one.

View .eu domains

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a German address or an Admin-C in Germany?

No. The local-presence requirement was dropped on 25 May 2018 and DENIC stopped recording an administrative contact at the same time. The only German-contact obligation left is section 3(4) of the Domain Terms and Conditions: if you are not domiciled in Germany and a third party asserting a right applies to serve documents, DENIC will ask you to name an authorised representative in Germany within two weeks.

Does .de have a redemption period?

Yes, although it is often reported otherwise. DENIC's Domain Guidelines give a deleted name a Redemption Grace Period running until a randomly chosen moment on the 31st day after the registration ended, and only the last holder or someone they nominate can register it in that window. Openprovider gives us 29 days to restore it from our side.

What is TRANSIT and why did DENIC write to me?

TRANSIT is what happens when the provider administering your domain stops doing so without the domain being deleted. DENIC takes over administration through DENICdirect and writes to the holder's postal address with a password and a deadline. Inside that deadline you can transfer the domain to a new provider or delete it without paying DENIC anything; if you do nothing, DENIC terminates the contract under section 7(2)(k).

Why does my zone have to work before I can register the name?

DENIC checks the nameservers at registration and at transfer, and will refuse to use ones that fail the check. In practice that means at least two nameservers on different addresses, an authoritative answer and at least one A record in the zone. DENIC publishes a checker at denic.de and we configure the zone before submitting the request.

Can I use umlauts in a .de domain?

Yes, and more widely than most registries allow. The Annex to DENIC's Domain Guidelines adds 93 characters to the ASCII set, covering the German umlauts and the sharp s along with a large range of other European letters. The name is stored in the DNS in its ACE-encoded form, and the 63-character limit is measured on that encoded string.