.uk domains: a short history

The .uk ending is one of the oldest country codes on the internet. Here is how it grew from its academic beginnings to more than ten million registrations, with dates and figures taken from the organisations involved.

1985: .uk enters the root

The IANA root zone database, the official record of top-level domains, gives a registration date of 24 July 1985 for .uk. Nominet notes that .uk was one of the world's first country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), and that it was chosen instead of .gb because .uk was already in use in the academic world.

In the early years .uk was run first by University College London and then by the United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association (UKERNA).

1996: Nominet takes over

Nominet was founded in 1996 and took over the running of .uk. It marked its 30th anniversary on 24 May 2026. In 1996 it managed around 26,000 domains. By May 2026 it reported 10.4 million .uk domains, and 50 million unique domains registered since 1996.

As the registry, Nominet keeps the central database of .uk registrations, runs the DNS for the .uk zone, sets the rules for the zones it administers, and works through registrars, who sell names to the public. It says it handles around 4 billion DNS lookups a day across .uk. Since 2001 it has also run a Dispute Resolution Service, which it says has dealt with more than 16,000 disputes.

The second-level domains

For most of its history you could not register a name directly under .uk. Instead you chose a second-level domain that described what you were, such as .co.uk or .org.uk, and registered your name beneath it. Nominet's registration policy sets out what each of its zones is for:

• .co.uk: commercial use (advisory). By far the largest, with 8 million domains in May 2026.
• .org.uk: not-for-profit organisations (advisory).
• .me.uk: personal names. The registrant must be an individual.
• .ltd.uk and .plc.uk: private and public limited companies. The name must be derived from the company's official registered name.
• .net.uk: internet service providers' infrastructure.
• .sch.uk: schools, usually in the form schoolname.area.sch.uk. Northern Ireland school names are allocated by the Education Authority Northern Ireland.

Several other second-level zones are delegated to other bodies, which set their own rules:

• .ac.uk: higher and further education and research institutions. Jisc says it has administered .ac.uk since 1996.
• .gov.uk: national, regional and local government. GOV.UK guidance says approved names are assigned on behalf of the Cabinet Office by a domains team at the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO), and applications go through a .gov.uk Approved Registrar. CDDO became part of the Government Digital Service, within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, in January 2025, and Nominet's policy now lists the Government Digital Service as administrator. Nominet operates the .gov.uk registry on the government's behalf. Jisc, which used to manage the gov.uk namespace, stopped doing so on 26 June 2024.
• .nhs.uk: the NHS. NHS England's namespace policy says nhs.uk is controlled by its DNS team.
• .mod.uk and .mil.uk (defence) and .parliament.uk are also delegated.

2014: names directly under .uk

Nominet announced in January 2014 that names directly under .uk would launch on 10 June 2014, so people could register example.uk as well as example.co.uk. Nominet's own nominet.uk is an example: when we checked its RDAP record on 4 October 2026, it showed a registration date of 10 June 2014.

To protect existing holders, Nominet reserved the matching .uk name for people who already held the equivalent third-level name, such as the .co.uk. Only domains registered before 23:59 on 28 October 2013 qualified, and holders were given five years to decide.

The change is a good illustration of why software cannot work out the registrable part of a domain just by counting dots. The IETF's DNS terminology document, RFC 9499, cites the 2014 .uk change as an example of a public suffix changing with registry policy. Tools therefore rely on the Public Suffix List (see the glossary).

2019: the reserved rights end

The reserved rights expired at 06:00 BST on 25 June 2019. Nominet says that by the close, more than 8 million of the original 10 million rights had either been taken up or had lapsed. From 1 July 2019 the unclaimed names were released in daily batches, and they became generally available between 8 and 12 July 2019.

.uk in numbers

Nominet's own figures, stated as of May 2026:

• 10.4 million .uk domains under management;
• 8 million of them in .co.uk;
• around 168,000 .uk names registered a month, on average, in 2026 so far;
• 7.7 million renewals in the previous 12 months.

Check Nominet's site for later updates.

Looking up a .uk domain: WHOIS and RDAP

Registration data for .uk can be queried using RDAP, the structured, modern replacement for WHOIS. IANA lists Nominet's RDAP server for .uk at rdap.nominet.uk/uk/, and Nominet's web lookup tool uses RDAP behind the scenes. Nominet says a registrant's personal details are not published unless they have consented.

Two changes are coming. Nominet plans to move .uk onto its newer registry platform on Tuesday 9 February 2027, and says .uk will stop using WHOIS at that point. The same switchover brings a new expiry lifecycle, explained in our guide to buying expired domains.

A Domain Statistics report uses RDAP to show a .uk domain's registration date, registrar and status codes. For what each field means, see the glossary, and for how to read the dates, see domain age.