.fr

Register a .fr domain

The French extension, run by Afnic. Anyone resident or established in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland may hold one, so Swiss companies qualify without an intermediary.

Extension type: Country-code (ccTLD)
Who can register: Eligibility rules apply
Registry: Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération (Afnic)
Renews at: On request

Check a .fr name

.fr pricing

Live pricing is temporarily unavailable for .fr.

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

Before you register .fr

What the price includes: Every .fr 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 .fr name does lapse, restoring it costs considerably more than renewing it would have — the restore price is in the table above.
Transfers: Transferring .fr 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.
Who may register: .fr is a restricted extension. The registry's eligibility rules are set out above and are checked by the registry, not by us — a registration that does not qualify is refused or later cancelled by them, and we refund what we can rather than what we would like to.

Restricted extension

Open to holders established in the EU or an EFTA state

Registry: Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération (Afnic).

Under article 5.1 of the Afnic Naming Policy, a domain may be registered or renewed by any natural person residing in, or any legal person with its registered office or main establishment in, an EU member state, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland.
The same eligibility rules apply to the administrative contact, not only to the holder. Naming an agency or a person outside those territories as administrative contact is a common and avoidable mistake.
Both the holder and the administrative contact must be reachable: a working telephone number and email address, and identity details kept accurate for as long as the name is active.
If you have no eligible address, Openprovider, the platform we register through, offers a local-presence service for .fr. It resolves eligibility; it does not make the name yours in some lesser sense.

What the eligibility rule actually asks of you

Afnic is the association that operates .fr under the supervision of the French state, and unlike a gTLD registry it applies a territorial eligibility test. The test is not French residence. Article 5.1 of the Naming Policy in force from 6 July 2026 admits any natural person residing in, and any legal person with a registered office or main establishment in, an EU member state or in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland.

For a Swiss business that is the whole story: you qualify on your own footing, with no trustee, no French subsidiary and no waiting for approval. The detail that catches people is article 96, which applies the same eligibility rules to the administrative contact. If you appoint an agency in a non-eligible country as administrative contact, the registration is exposed even though the holder is perfectly eligible. We set the contacts up with that rule in mind rather than discovering it during a verification.

How Afnic polices and ends a registration

Eligibility is declared at registration and checked afterwards. Afnic runs a two-stage qualification procedure: a verification process, which has no effect on your names, and a substantiation process, which does. Once substantiation opens, the holder's whole portfolio is suspended for a maximum of seven days; if no evidence arrives, it is blocked for a maximum of thirty days; if there is still nothing, Afnic deletes the portfolio. Producing the documents at any stage closes the procedure, which is why the contact details on the record need to reach a person who reads them.

The end of life is shorter than the gTLD equivalent. There is no 45-day auto-renew grace: at expiry your registrar simply requests deletion, and deletion opens a 30-day redemption period in which the name is frozen against new applicants and can be restored with its previous configuration. After that it is genuinely released. We show renewal pricing next to registration pricing on this page for the same reason we spell out the 30 days: both are things you would otherwise learn a year later.

Terms and lifecycle

What holding a .fr actually commits you to

Term: A .fr registration runs for a period of your choosing between one and ten years from registration. Renewal is implied at the registry: the name continues unless your registrar sends Afnic a deletion request.
If you miss the renewal: At expiry an unrenewed name is sent to Afnic for deletion, which starts a 30-day redemption period. During those 30 days no one else can register it and it can be reactivated with the same configuration; once they elapse the deletion is irreversible and the name returns to the public pool.
Transfer: You ask your current registrar for the AUTH_INFO code and hand it to the new one. That registrar then has eight days to agree or to object and so gain one further non-renewable period of 22 days; if it says nothing within the eight days the transfer completes automatically. There is no ICANN-style 60-day lock, because .fr is not a gTLD.
Registrant verification: Afnic can open a substantiation procedure on its own initiative, at a registrar's request or on a third-party report. Your portfolio is suspended for up to 7 days, then blocked for up to 30 days, and deleted if no evidence of eligibility arrives. Sending the evidence closes the procedure at any point.
Names and characters: Accented and ligatured Latin characters are accepted, so names with e-acute, c-cedilla or oe register normally. The same naming policy governs the French overseas extensions .re, .yt, .pm, .wf and .tf.

Fit

Who .fr is for

Selling into France
French buyers read .fr as a French business. For a shop, a service or a brand aimed at that market it is the extension people try first.
Swiss and EU companies without a French entity
You do not need a French address or a SIRET to hold one. Establishment anywhere in the EU, or in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland, satisfies article 5.1 on its own.
Not for holders outside those territories
If your company is established in, say, the United States or the United Kingdom, .fr requires a local-presence service. Where France is not central to the plan, a .com or a .eu is the cleaner buy.

Pair it with the Swiss side of the business

Companies selling across the border usually want both. .ch is open to anyone with no eligibility test at all, which makes it the simplest second name to hold next to a .fr.

View .ch domains

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to be based in France to register a .fr domain?

No. Afnic requires residence, a registered office or a main establishment in an EU member state or in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland. A Swiss or German company qualifies directly, with no French entity and no trustee.

Can a company outside the EU and EFTA hold a .fr domain?

Not on its own footing. Openprovider, the registrar platform we work through, offers a local-presence service that supplies an eligible address for .fr. Ask us before you buy, because it changes what the contacts on the record look like.

What happens if I forget to renew my .fr domain?

Your registrar sends Afnic a deletion request, which starts a 30-day redemption period. Nobody else can register the name in that window and it can be reactivated with the same settings. Once the 30 days pass the deletion is irreversible.

How long does a .fr transfer take?

You need the AUTH_INFO code from your current registrar. It then has eight days to approve or object; an objection buys it one further non-renewable period of 22 days. If it does nothing, the transfer goes through automatically after the eight days.

Can Afnic take my .fr domain away?

It can delete a portfolio at the end of a substantiation procedure, if no evidence of the holder's eligibility or reachability is provided within a maximum of 7 days and then a maximum of 30 days. Keeping the holder and administrative contact details accurate is the practical defence.