The Largest ICANN-Accredited Registrar Groups in 2026

By DomainKits Team • October 26, 2026

ICANN lists 3,325 accredited registrars, but most are not separate businesses. TurnCommerce, Newfold Digital and Gname control the bulk of the list through shell registrars set up to catch expiring domain names as soon as they drop.

The companies with the most accreditations

Three groups hold 2,637 of the 3,325 accreditations. TurnCommerce, the Denver company behind DropCatch.com, NameBright and HugeDomains, leads with 1,552. Nearly all of them (1,501) are numbered shells from DropCatch.com 345 LLC to DropCatch.com 1845 LLC, accredited in waves: Domain Incite tracked 299 in the last week of 2014, 500 in December 2016 and another 300 in September 2026 (DropCatch.com 1546 LLC to 1845 LLC).

Newfold Digital, created by the 2021 merger of Endurance and Web.com, is second with 585. Alongside retail brands such as Network Solutions, Register.com, Domain.com and Bluehost, its roster includes SNAPNAMES 1, LLC through SNAPNAMES 98, LLC from SnapNames, the drop-catcher Web.com acquired in 2014. SnapNames and NameJet pooled their backorders for pending-delete domains in April 2016.

Singapore-based Gname is third with 500: its flagship Gname.com accreditation plus 499 US-registered shells numbered Gname 001 Inc to Gname 500 Inc, with Gname 300 Inc missing. Domain Incite covered those batches between 2021 and May 2025.

Smaller groups follow the same pattern. Sav.com has 51 accreditations (Sav.com, LLC and Sav.com, LLC - 1 to 50), and Dynadot has 25 (Dynadot Inc, Global Domain Group and 23 numbered Dynadot LLCs).

Because WHOIS and RDAP records only show the individual registrar name on the contract, the parent group is often not obvious. The DomainKits Registrar Lookup maps each IANA ID to its parent company.

Why they hold so many accreditations

All five of the largest groups run drop-catching services: TurnCommerce operates DropCatch.com, Newfold Digital runs NameJet, and Gname, Sav.com and Dynadot take backorders on their own sites.

Every ICANN accreditation comes with its own registry connections. When a valuable domain expires and enters the final drop window, registrars fire registration requests at the registry in milliseconds. Holding more accreditations gives a drop-catcher more parallel connections, which improves the odds of landing the name first. That was the reason Domain Incite cited when TurnCommerce added 300 registrars in September 2026, and when Unstoppable Domains added ten in April.

The scale of that traffic shows up in Verisign's .com monthly registry reports, which ICANN publishes after a three-month hold. The report breaks activity down by accreditation, listing both the create commands sent (all registration attempts, failed or successful) and the net names registered (excluding add-grace deletions). Summing the June 2026 rows by group, alongside GoDaddy for comparison, shows the difference between retail registration and drop-catching.

In the table, GoDaddy's create commands barely exceed the names it registered. The five drop-catching groups, by contrast, sent 493,430,629 of the 512,072,320 create commands recorded across the entire .com registry in June 2026. (TurnCommerce's 300 September 2026 accreditations postdate the June report, so its row covers the other 1,252 of its 1,552 registrars.)

Summary

ICANN's registrar list is dominated by a handful of groups built around drop-catching platforms. Because each contract carries its own registry bandwidth, these operators register shell companies by the hundred to compete for expiring names. In June 2026 alone, the top five groups accounted for nearly half a billion .com create commands, while only a tiny fraction of those attempts resulted in a registered domain.

• Accreditations: ICANN's list of accredited registrars, 26 October 2026, without ICANN's test registrar; names checked against the IANA registrar ID registry.
• .com figures: Verisign's monthly .com reports to ICANN for May and June 2026.
• Companies: accreditations that share an ICANN contact email or phone, or that a company filing, company site or trade press places in a group, count as one company.
• Active domain counts for every TLD are on the Data Overview page.