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Domain transfer guide

A transfer moves who bills you and who manages the domain. It does not move your website, and if you get the order wrong it can take your site down for the duration.

Updated September 2026 · 5 min read

What a transfer actually changes

A transfer changes the registrar of record — the company that holds your registration with the registry and charges you for it. Ownership stays with you. The website, the email and the DNS records are separate things that may or may not follow, depending on where they are hosted.

This is where transfers go wrong. If your DNS is hosted at the registrar you are leaving, the zone can disappear when the transfer completes, and everything that depends on it stops. Move DNS first, confirm with a DNS lookup that it answers from its new home, and only then transfer the registration.

The 60-day locks

ICANN rules lock a domain against transfer for 60 days after it is first registered, and for 60 days after a change of registrant details. Both are hard limits — no registrar can waive them. The second one catches people who tidy up their contact details and then try to transfer the same week.

A newly transferred domain also cannot be transferred again for 60 days.

The steps

StepWhereNote

Move DNS to its new homeNew DNS providerDo this first, and verify it

Unlock the domainLosing registrarOften called transfer lock or clientTransferProhibited

Disable WHOIS privacyLosing registrarSome registrars require this so the approval email can reach you

Request the EPP codeLosing registrarAlso called the auth code or transfer key

Start the transferGaining registrarPay here; this usually adds a year

Approve the emailAdmin contact inboxCheck spam — this is where most transfers stall

WaitRegistryUp to 5 days, often much less

The year you pay for is not lost

Most gTLD transfers require you to buy a year, and that year is added to your existing expiry rather than replacing it. If the domain had eight months left, it will have twenty after the transfer. You are not paying twice.

When a transfer will be refused

Inside either 60-day lock. While the domain is still locked at the losing registrar. With a wrong or expired EPP code. When the admin contact email no longer works — which is the single most common cause, and the hardest to fix under time pressure, because correcting it starts a fresh 60-day lock.

Do not start a transfer in the last two weeks before expiry. If it stalls, you are fighting a deadline as well as a process, and what happens after a domain expires — grace period, then redemption at a much higher fee — is a worse problem than a transfer that has to be restarted.

Before you start, a WHOIS lookup shows the current registrar, the expiry date and the status codes that say whether the domain is still locked — the three things that decide whether a transfer can begin at all.