Grace, Redemption, Pending Delete: 14 Registrars Compared (2026)

A domain does not die on its expiry date. It walks through four stages, and each stage has a different price and a different owner. Miss the first stage and a $12 renewal becomes an $85 restore. Miss the last one and the name is gone to whoever is fastest at the drop.

The confusing part is that these windows are not the same at every registrar. ICANN sets a floor, not a schedule, so each registrar picks its own numbers on top. This article puts them side by side.

The four stages, in plain words

1. Standard grace period (renewal grace). The domain has expired but it is still yours. You renew at the normal price, sometimes with a small late fee. The site usually stops working part way through this window, which is what most people notice first.

2. Redemption grace period (RGP). The domain has been deleted by the registrar and handed back toward the registry. It is still recoverable, but only by the original owner, and only by paying a restore fee on top of the renewal. That fee is normally $70 to $150. The registry charges the registrar around $40 to $75 and the registrar adds its margin.

3. Pending delete. Five days of nothing. No one can renew it, no one can restore it, not even the registrar. The name is simply queued for release.

4. Release (the drop). The domain returns to the general pool and becomes available again, usually at a precise moment that drop-catch services fight over. Some registries divert valuable names to a premium tier or an auction instead of releasing them.

The ICANN baseline for gTLDs

For .com, .net, .org and most new gTLDs, ICANN rules give you:

• An auto-renew grace period of 0 to 45 days, chosen by the registrar. This is why the first column of the table below varies so much.
• A redemption grace period of 30 days, which is mandatory once the name is deleted.
• A pending delete phase of 5 days, fixed, with no exceptions.

Country code TLDs such as .uk, .de, .fr and .ca do not follow this at all. Their registries set their own timelines, and your registrar can only pass on whatever the registry allows. Treat everything below as gTLD behaviour, .com in particular.

Comparison table

Days are counted from the expiry date unless the cell says otherwise. Fees are the restore or redemption cost on top of the renewal price.

Registrar	Standard grace period	Redemption grace period	Pending delete	Restore fee
GoDaddy	To day 18 at standard price	From day 18, with expired auctions from day 26 and a closeout auction near day 36	5 days	Around $80 plus renewal
Namecheap	30 days	30 days from deletion	5 days	Redemption fee plus the $0.20 ICANN fee
Porkbun	Roughly 37 to 38 days	30 days from deletion	5 days	Registry redemption fee, quoted by support
Dynadot	Up to 30 days for most gTLDs, with a late renewal fee in the final 10 days	About 30 days	5 days	Registry restore fee
NameSilo	Days 1 to 30 at standard price	Days 41 to 64, after an auction window on days 31 to 40	Days 65 to 69	Registry penalty fee
Cloudflare Registrar	40 days, resolving normally for the first 30	Days 41 to 70	Days 71 to 75	At cost, no markup
NameBright	30 days	30 days, so 60 days total	5 days	$85 for .com and .net
Sav	30 days	30 days where the registry offers it, not guaranteed	5 days	Around $80 plus renewal
Spaceship	30 days, but the domain stops resolving on day 8	About 30 days from deletion	5 days	Restore fee quoted by support
DreamHost	30 days	30 days	5 days	Around $150 for .com
Name.com	15 to 30 days depending on the TLD	Up to 30 days	5 days	$120, or $150 for .cn
Epik	30 days	Roughly to day 41, longer on some TLDs	5 days	Variable redeem price
Atom (ex Squadhelp)	Not published, follows the registry default	30 days from deletion	5 days	Quoted by support
Unstoppable Domains	29 days on standard DNS domains, renewed or transferred out at cost. Web3 names have no renewal at all	30 days from deletion	5 days	Higher restoration fee after day 29

Registrars change these numbers without announcing them, and several publish them only inside a logged-in help centre. Before you rely on a single day in this table for a domain you care about, confirm it with your registrar in writing.

What stands out

GoDaddy is the shortest fuse of the big names

Eighteen days at the standard price is well under the thirty most people assume. Worse for an investor, the domain enters GoDaddy's expired auction around day 26, and once a bid is placed you can no longer simply renew it. You can still redeem, but you are now negotiating with a live auction. The domain finally leaves the account entirely around day 72. If you keep names at GoDaddy, treat day 18 as the real deadline, not day 30.

Cloudflare gives you the most room and the cheapest exit

Forty days of grace, then thirty days of redemption, and the restore is charged at registry cost with no registrar markup. Cloudflare sells domains at wholesale and does not run an expired auction business, so there is no incentive to shorten your window. The trade-off is a thin feature set and no ccTLD coverage worth mentioning.

NameSilo puts an auction in the middle

NameSilo's timeline is the longest on the list, roughly seventy days end to end, but days 31 to 40 are an auction window where the domain has already left your account. Recovery after that runs into a registry penalty fee. Long window, but the useful part of it is still the first thirty days.

Porkbun quietly gives you an extra week

Porkbun does not stop at thirty. In practice the domain is removed from the account somewhere between day 35 and day 45, most often around day 37 or 38. That is a real cushion, but it is a range rather than a promise, so do not plan a renewal for day 36.

Spaceship kills resolution on day 8

The domain is safe for the full grace period, but the website and email stop working a week in. If a name is parked and earning, or pointing at a live site, the commercial damage starts long before the domain is at risk.

Unstoppable Domains runs two different products

Unstoppable is best known for blockchain names recorded on Ethereum and Polygon. Those are bought once and kept with no annual renewal, so they have no grace period, no redemption, no pending delete and no drop. They also never appear in a registry zone file, resolve only where support has been added, and cannot be tracked with RDAP or WHOIS. Treat them as a separate asset class, not as domains with an expiry date.

Unstoppable also sells standard DNS domains, and those follow the normal lifecycle. Its published policy gives a 29-day grace period during which you can renew or transfer the domain out at cost, with higher restoration fees after that window closes, then the usual 30-day redemption and 5-day pending delete at the registry. Twenty-nine days is one day shorter than the thirty most people assume, which is exactly the kind of detail that costs someone a name.

Atom is a marketplace first

Atom, formerly Squadhelp, became an accredited registrar so it could hold and transfer the brandable names it sells. It does not publish a lifecycle table the way a retail registrar does, so assume the registry default of thirty days grace, thirty days redemption and five days pending delete, and contact support early if a name lapses.

What the fee differences actually cost you

Restore pricing is where registrars diverge most, and it is almost pure margin. The registry charges roughly $40 to $75 to restore a .com. Cloudflare passes that through. NameBright charges $85. Name.com charges $120. DreamHost charges about $150. On a single hand-registered name that gap is larger than ten years of renewals.

The practical conclusion is not to move everything to the cheapest restorer. It is that redemption should never happen. Every restore fee you pay is a filing failure, not a market cost.

Five rules that keep you out of redemption

1. Track expiry dates outside the registrar. Renewal reminders go to the email address on the account, which is the one address most likely to be full, filtered, or attached to an old job.
2. Use the registrar's real deadline, not thirty days. Eighteen at GoDaddy, thirty at most others, and never the outer edge of a range.
3. Set a warning at sixty days, not seven. Card expiry, a failed charge and a bounced email can easily eat a week between them.
4. Keep the payment card current everywhere. Most lost domains are not forgotten, they are auto-renew failures on a dead card.
5. Watch names you deliberately drop. If you let a name expire on purpose, note the pending delete date. If someone else catches it and develops it, you learn something about your own valuation.

Tracking this across registrars

The reason this table matters is that most investors are spread across four or five registrars, each with a different clock. A single portfolio view with one expiry column solves that, which is what DNFolder's domain portfolio tracker is built for. It pulls the expiry date over RDAP when you add a domain, so the date comes from the registry rather than from your memory, and it stores everything in an AES-256 vault encrypted in your browser.

If you want the background on the lookup side, read RDAP vs WHOIS, and for the wider system read how to track expiry dates across five registrars.