How Many ICANN-Accredited Registrars Are There in 2026?

By DomainKits Team • October 26, 2026

ICANN's list of accredited registrars has 3,326 entries as of 26 October 2026. One of them is ICANN's own testing registrar, which leaves 3,325 commercial accreditations. Sort those by the company that holds them and the list shrinks to 460: 400 companies with one accreditation each, 43 companies that hold two or more and whose ownership two independent sources confirm, and 17 groups of two or three accreditations that share contact details but have no ownership record, counted here as one company each. Three companies, TurnCommerce, Newfold Digital and Gname, hold 2,637 accreditations between them. Drop-catching, registering a domain in the moments after the registry deletes it and it becomes available again, is the main reason they hold so many. Most of what remains is a set of acquisition families and a layer of shared platforms.

Why one company holds 1,552 accreditations

An accreditation is a contract with ICANN that lets a registrar connect to the gTLD registries and register names directly. Each accreditation comes with its own registry connections. When Unstoppable Domains added ten accreditations in April 2026, Domain Incite explained the reason in one line: more accreditations mean more concurrent registry connections, which is how a registrar competes in the drop-catching market. The way to get more accreditations is to form a company for each one.

TurnCommerce, the Denver company behind DropCatch.com, NameBright and HugeDomains, holds 1,552. Of these, 1,501 belong to companies named DropCatch.com 345 LLC through DropCatch.com 1845 LLC, another 50 to LLCs with names such as NameJolt.com and DomainFalcon, and one to NameBright. The batches are on record: 299 accreditations in the last week of 2014, 500 more in 2016, and 300 more in September 2026.

Newfold Digital, formed in 2021 when Endurance and Web.com merged, holds 585. The brands people know are Network Solutions, Register.com, Web.com, BigRock, PublicDomainRegistry and Crazy Domains. The count comes from SnapNames, the expired-domain service Web.com bought from KeyDrive in 2014: 98 companies named SNAPNAMES 72, LLC and upward, 24 numbered NamePal.com LLCs, and about 400 other single-purpose LLCs. Web.com also bought close to 100 accreditations from Rightside's eNom in 2016 for USD 1.3 million.

Gname, a Singapore company, holds 500: its own accreditation plus 499 companies registered in the United States and named Gname 001 Inc through Gname 500 Inc. They arrived in three batches between 2021 and May 2025, the last one 200 companies named Gname 301 Inc through Gname 500 Inc.

The same pattern repeats at a smaller scale. Sav.com formed 50 numbered LLCs in May 2021; Dynadot holds 23 numbered LLCs next to its main accreditation; Unstoppable Domains holds UnstoppableUS1 LLC through UnstoppableUS10 LLC. Add them up and 2,212 accreditations sit with numbered entities, 2,208 of them registered in the United States. That is why ICANN's list shows 2,808 entries for the United States while the country has 106 registrar companies.

Every one of these entities appears under its own name in WHOIS and RDAP output. To see the company behind an IANA ID, use the DomainKits Registrar Lookup.

The acquisition families

Take the numbered entities away and the list reads like a history of registrar deals. GoDaddy's 13 accreditations are the clearest example. Next to GoDaddy.com, Wild West Domains, Blue Razor and five Go Domains LLCs for single countries sit 123-Reg and Mesh Digital (the owner of Domainmonster), which came with Host Europe Group in a deal priced at USD 1.79 billion; GoDaddy Corporate Domains; Bombora Technologies, the Australian registrar whose ultimate parent is GoDaddy Inc.; and the Uniregistry registrar business bought in 2020.

Tucows, in Toronto, holds four: Tucows Domains (OpenSRS), eNom, bought from Rightside in 2017 for USD 83.5 million, EPAG in Bonn, bought in 2011, and Ascio, bought from CSC in 2019. Hover, its retail brand, has no accreditation of its own. Tucows' FY2025 subsidiary list names all four.

Not every multi-accreditation group is a deal history. In Xiamen, XZ.com (DotMedia) operates 20 accreditations that Domain Incite describes as appearing to be under common management; six of them received ICANN breach notices on the same day in September 2024.

Links that are not ownership

Two kinds of connection show up in the records without a parent company behind them. The first is shared infrastructure. LogicBoxes, the registrar platform inside Newfold, hosts the RDAP service for 65 accreditations held by 60 separate companies; Tucows hosts it for 11 under its OpenSRS hosted registrar service; Key-Systems and Ascio for two each. A registrar on someone else's platform is still its own company.

The second is shared contact details with no ownership record. In 17 cases, 37 accreditations in all, two or three accreditations list the same email domain or phone number on ICANN's list and nothing published says how they are related. Thirteen of the 17 are in China (West.cn, eName, Todaynic and Eranet, NiceNIC, Juming, ZDNS, Bangning and Knet among them), with one each in Türkiye, Israel, Singapore and Australia. We count each case as one company, so 460 is the low end of the range: if every accreditation in these 17 groups belonged to a different company, the count would be 480.

Where the 460 companies are

A company is placed by its headquarters, not by where its accredited entities are registered, which is why the regions do not match the countries on ICANN's list. Two entries on the list name no country at all; their companies are placed by headquarters like the rest. North America has 140 companies, 106 of them in the United States and 19 in Canada, and 2,397 accreditations, most of them the numbered entities above. Asia has the most companies, 160: 55 in mainland China and 15 in Hong Kong, 13 in Japan, 12 in India, 10 each in Korea and Türkiye, 7 each in Singapore and Indonesia. Its 724 accreditations include Gname's 500, counted in Singapore because that is where Gname is based.

Europe has 138 companies and 175 accreditations: 20 in the United Kingdom, 19 in Germany, 14 in France, 11 in Spain, 10 in Russia, 7 in Italy. No European company holds more than nine, and the largest, Team Internet, IONOS and team.blue, are the acquisition families in the table. Oceania has 8 companies, led by Trillion.com in Australia with six accreditations (Above.com, Netfleet, Drop.com.au among them), Synergy Wholesale and Netregistry. Africa has 13 companies with 14 accreditations: HostAfrica and Domains.co.za in South Africa, Upperlink and Enrol in Nigeria, DNS Africa in Mauritius, AFRIREGISTER in Burundi, ATI in Tunisia, Ghana Dot Com, Kheweul in Senegal, Arcanes and Genious in Morocco, Cloud4Africa in Côte d'Ivoire, and one registered in the Seychelles. South America has one: Dattatec in Argentina.

What the 460 companies do

By main business, 164 of the 460 are retail registrars and 124 are hosting companies with a registrar inside. 35 sell mainly through resellers, Tucows, Key-Systems and Openprovider among them. 28 manage domains for corporations: CSC, Markmonitor Group, Nameshield, Lexsynergy, and Meta's two in-house accreditations, RegistrarSafe and RegistrarSEC. 13 belong to registries, such as Identity Digital's Name.com, Nominet Registrar Services and JPRS Registrar. Four are drop-catching specialists, and for 92 companies no readable company site says what they do.

How the 460 were counted

The unit is the company that holds the accreditation, not the accredited entity. Two accreditations go into one company when two independent sources agree: company filings such as SEC subsidiary exhibits, company sites, the trade press, and the contact details and name patterns on ICANN's own list. Where the only link is a shared email domain or phone number, the accreditations stay together but are marked unconfirmed, which is the 17 groups above. The DomainKits registrar records served as one source and were never used alone.

The full grouping is in one CSV file: a row for each of the 3,325 accreditations with its IANA ID, name, listed country, group, the group's headquarters, region and main business, the type of evidence that places it in the group, and up to two sources. For the 400 single accreditations the only source is ICANN's list.

Summary

ICANN's list grew by companies rather than by registrars: 299 TurnCommerce LLCs in 2014, 500 in 2016, Gname's batches from 2021, Sav's 50 in 2021, 300 more for TurnCommerce and 10 for Unstoppable Domains in 2026. The operating companies moved the other way, into families: Web.com and Endurance became Newfold in 2021, CentralNic merged with KeyDrive in 2018, Gandi and Total Webhosting Solutions became Your.Online in 2023, and Com Laude took over Markmonitor in January 2026.

Two things to watch in the next list: whether Team Internet's domains business, nine accreditations in one package, finds its buyer, and whether the numbered entities keep growing after the 310 added in 2026.

• Accreditations are from ICANN's list of accredited registrars (CSV, 26 October 2026) and the IANA registrar ID registry.
• Ownership comes from company filings (SEC subsidiary exhibits, annual reports), company sites and trade press (Domain Incite, Domain Name Wire). A group needs two independent sources; accreditations that only share contact details (17 groups, 37 accreditations) are counted as one company with ownership unconfirmed.
• Region is the headquarters country: Hong Kong and Taiwan count as Asia, Russia as Europe, the Caribbean as North America.
• Active domain counts for every TLD are on the Data Overview page.