FAQs

Transfers & Pricing

12 questions covering transfer timelines and rules, what at-cost pricing means, auth codes, DNS during a transfer, and what happens when a domain reaches its expiry date. The largest category in the Help Center.

ICANN policy requires a minimum five-day transfer window. Most transfers complete within five to seven days.

The clock starts when NameBright submits the transfer request to the registry — after you've approved the confirmation email and unlocked the domain at your current registrar.

Losing registrars have five business days to object. If they don't, the transfer completes automatically.

Yes. ICANN requires registrars to extend the registration by one year when a domain transfers. The transfer fee covers that additional year.

If the domain has 2 years remaining, it will have 3 years after the transfer completes.

An auth code (also called an EPP code or authorization code) is a one-time password that authorizes a transfer away from the current registrar. It prevents unauthorized transfers.

Your current registrar is required by ICANN to provide the auth code within five business days of your request. The code is usually available immediately in the domain's control panel.

See the guide on obtaining your auth code for registrar-specific instructions.

No. ICANN's 60-day lock policy prevents transfers within 60 days of a domain's registration date or its last transfer date. You must wait until the lock period expires.

Your nameservers and DNS records remain unchanged during an inbound transfer. NameBright imports the nameservers from the old registrar.

If your domain was using the old registrar's DNS hosting, you may need to switch to NameBright DNS or another DNS provider after the transfer, because the old registrar may shut off DNS for transferred-out domains.

To initiate an outbound transfer:

  1. Log in to your NameBright account.

  2. Open the domain you want to transfer.

  3. Scroll to Transfer Away and click Unlock Domain .

  4. Click Get Auth Code — the code is emailed to the registrant email on record.

  5. Provide the auth code to the receiving registrar.

NameBright will approve the transfer request from the receiving registrar automatically once submitted. There is no manual approval step on NameBright's side.

No. Outbound transfers are free. NameBright does not charge a transfer-out fee or require a minimum balance to unlock a domain.

Domain expiry has several stages:

Stage Timing What happens
Grace period 0–29 days after expiry Domain still resolves. You can renew at standard price.
Redemption period 30–60 days after expiry Domain stops resolving. You can redeem it at a higher price (typically $80–100 above standard).
Pending delete 60–75 days after expiry Cannot be redeemed. Registry is preparing to release it.
Released 75+ days after expiry Domain becomes available for general registration at standard price.

No. NameBright does not offer a redemption-period backorder. A domain in redemption can only be renewed by its current registrant.

Once the domain enters the pending-delete phase and is released, it becomes available for anyone to register at standard price. DropCatch (a sister company of NameBright) monitors and attempts to catch expiring domains; you can place a backorder there.

$10.44 is the exact wholesale price Verisign (the .com registry) charges all accredited registrars. NameBright passes this through without rounding or adding a margin.

The price changes when Verisign's ICANN-approved wholesale price changes.

Transfer prices are the same as registration prices for most TLDs. The transfer fee covers one additional year of registration.

A small number of TLDs have a separate registry-mandated transfer fee that differs from the registration price. These are noted on the pricing page.

Yes. NameBright supports bulk transfers via the Bulk Transfer tool in your account dashboard. You can upload a CSV file with domain names and auth codes.

Bulk transfers follow the same five-day ICANN timeline as individual transfers. Each domain requires its own auth code. NameBright processes them in parallel, so a batch of 100 domains does not take 100 times longer than a single transfer.

For batches over 500 domains, contact NameBright support to coordinate — very large batches can trigger rate limits at the registry level.

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