ICANN just confirmed that 1,616 applications for new generic top-level domains are moving forward in the 2026 Round, out of 1,663 submitted before the window closed last month. That gap, 47 applications that didn’t make it through, comes down to one requirement: payment. Applicants who didn’t complete payment simply don’t advance, regardless of how much work went into the application itself.
The real anticipation now centers on what ICANN calls Reveal Day, when the public-facing details of every paid application go live on the Application Publication and Statistics website. That’s when the industry finally sees which companies applied for which strings, and just as importantly, which applicants are competing for the exact same string, setting up contention sets that could eventually head to auction.
ICANN expects to hold Reveal Day no later than October 14, in line with the nine-week window the Applicant Guidebook requires after submissions close, and the organization plans to announce the actual date along with a full slate of 2026 milestones early next week.
Those milestones will include the String Replacement Period, String Confirmation Day, and the Community Input and Objections Period, each one a formal step applicants have to clear before any new domain extension actually goes live.
In the meantime, ICANN is dealing with a familiar problem: people jumping the gun. Several would-be applicants have already gone public about which strings they claim to have applied for, ahead of any official confirmation. ICANN’s response is straightforward and worth taking seriously. The organization holds the only verified source for complete 2026 Round application data, covering who applied and for what. Anyone should treat anything circulating before Reveal Day as unconfirmed until ICANN says otherwise.
For domain investors, registries, and anyone tracking this round closely, the practical move right now is patience. Speculation about which strings are in play will keep spreading over the next few weeks, but the only information that actually counts is what ICANN itself publishes on Reveal Day. Everything else is guesswork dressed up as insider knowledge.
