Verisign filed a single-line disclosure with the SEC on August 27 announcing a price change that will eventually touch 12.5 million domain names: the wholesale cost of a .net registration is rising from $10.91 to $12.00, effective March 1, 2027. The increase works out to 9.99 percent, just short of the 10 percent ceiling Verisign’s registry agreement with ICANN allows it to raise prices each year.
That number stands out on its own. Verisign has room to go all the way to 10 percent under its contract, and it chose to land one hundredth of a point below that limit. Domain Incite, which tracks registry pricing closely, notes this will be the first .net increase since February 2024, meaning Verisign let roughly three years pass before using its next available price step.
The six-month gap between the announcement and the effective date matters more to registrars than it does to most registrants. Hosting providers and domain resellers now have two full billing quarters to adjust renewal pricing, rework bundle margins on plans that include a free first-year domain, and decide whether to raise prices across their entire TLD lineup at once or let .net move on its own. Registrants, meanwhile, can typically lock in current pricing by renewing multi-year before the change takes effect, depending on their registrar’s specific terms.
The math behind the increase is straightforward. .net sits as the fourth-largest top-level domain worldwide, with 12.5 million registrations recorded in the DNIB Quarterly Report for Q2 2026, and it holds one of the highest renewal rates among major TLDs at 78.7 percent. Applied across that base, the extra $1.09 per name works out to roughly $13.6 million in additional annual registry revenue, assuming the current registration base holds steady.
What makes .net a reliable target for this kind of increase is precisely that stability. Unlike TLDs where pricing changes can trigger noticeable drops in renewals, .net’s zone count tends to stay put even through regular price steps, which is exactly the kind of predictability that makes a contractual price increase worth taking.
