.us Domain Prices — Compare 42 Registrars

To register a .us name you have to have a real connection with the United States; under the US nexus policy you must fall into one of three categories: you can be a US citizen or a US resident, or you can be an organisation that has been established in the United States, or you can be a foreign entity which has a genuine presence in the United States, for example through having an office or engaging in regular business activities. The rule remains in force for as long as you retain the name, not just at the time of signing up.

In reality the check involved is quite minor. All you have to do is tick a box indicating which category you apply to, and no documents are checked at that stage. Enforcement is carried out later on. Anyone is allowed to file a nexus challenge, and an owner who is unable to prove a connection with the US is given 30 days to remedy the situation before the name is lost.

The other drawback is that .us does not permit WHOIS privacy or proxy services, a policy that has been followed by the government since 2005. Even if a registrar is offering free privacy for other extensions, your name, postal address, email address and phone number will appear in the public WHOIS record. Since NTIA has asked the bidders for 2026 how they would handle access to registrant data, this rule could be altered under the new administrator.

The dot US is not operated on the same basis as .com or .org by means of a contract with ICANN. Instead it is controlled by the NTIA, which is an agency of the Department of Commerce, and this agency engages a private company to carry out the operation. Neustar had the contract from 2001 and it was renewed in 2007, 2014 and 2019, after which GoDaddy took over the contract when it purchased Neustar's registry business.

That is now changing. On 1 October 2026 NTIA appointed Identity Digital as the next administrator of .us, the scope of which includes more than 2 million names (according to the NTIA announcement). The new contract has a three-year base term, and the transition from GoDaddy may take as long as nine months. NTIA requested bids containing new suggestions for preventing abuse and for enforcing the nexus rule. After the handover the registration rules and the wholesale prices might be altered, but no specific terms have been released yet.