In the 2026 Round, 333 of the 1,615 applications ICANN published on 7 October 2026 are .brand applications, roughly one in five. Those are primary-string figures, and ICANN says the final numbers will be confirmed on String Confirmation Day, 17 November 2026. If you run brand or marketing at a large company and are deciding whether to apply, this post explains what a .brand is, who applied, what the 2012 cohort did with theirs, and a four-line cost table you can fill in with supplier quotes. The application fee is only one of four cost lines. The other three repeat or compound every year.
What a .brand TLD is, and why it isn't an open extension
A .brand is a top-level domain with your brand name as the label, run by you, for you. Think of .yourbrand in the place where .com usually sits. You are not renting a name under someone else's extension. You operate the registry.
That is the hard difference from an open generic TLD such as the ones in our roundup of fun domain extensions. An open TLD sells names to anyone who pays the registrar price. A .brand sells to nobody. It is a closed registry: the only registrants are you, your affiliates and parties you authorise.
Specification 13 in plain English
The contract mechanism is Specification 13 of the Registry Agreement. One third-party explainer, domaindetails.com, describes it as a provision introduced in the 2012 programme that sets requirements and restrictions for single-registrant brand TLDs whose label matches the applicant's trademark. The same explainer says registrations can be limited to the registry operator itself, affiliates such as subsidiaries and related companies, or trademark licensees with permission to use the brand. Treat that as a summary, not the legal text. Your counsel should read the actual agreement.
What it is not
A .brand is not a closed generic. ICANN's Prepare to Apply page says applications for exclusive use strings (closed generics) will not be approved, and points to Applicant Guidebook section 3.1.7. You cannot apply for a dictionary word and reserve it for yourself. The closed-registry route runs through a string that is your trademark.
Two other basics from the same page:
- The 2026 Round supports these application types: general, community, Geographic Name, Reserved Name.Brand, IDN, variant of an existing gTLD, and variant of a new gTLD. An application can be more than one type.
- Only legal entities (corporations, organisations, institutions, plus governmental, non-governmental and inter-governmental bodies) may apply. A marketing team can't apply; the company can.
The rules sit in the Applicant Guidebook, version V1-2025.12.16 dated 16 December 2025, which ICANN labels the final version per Board Resolution 2025.10.30.12.1. It is the authoritative document, so cite it rather than blog posts, including this one.
Who applied in the 2026 round
Start with the headline figures from ICANN's Reveal Day announcement of 7 October 2026. The submission window ran from 30 April to 12 August 2026, and the snapshot records:
- 1,615 applications in total
- 333 brand applications
- 16 community-based and 15 self-identified geographic name applications
- 51 from Applicant Support Program applicants
- 21 Internationalized Domain Name applications and 9 for variants
The arithmetic is plain: 333 out of 1,615 is about 20.6 percent. Brands are a large minority of the round, not a footnote. ICANN's CEO Kurtis Lindqvist called Reveal Day "an important milestone for the next expansion of the Domain Name System." Fair enough. A brand lead should care less about the ceremony and more about what sits inside that 333.
Where the applicants are
The snapshot splits all applications by region, not just brand ones:
| Region | Applications |
|---|---|
| Africa | 16 |
| Asia/Australia/Pacific | 218 |
| Europe | 506 |
| Latin America and the Caribbean | 11 |
| North America | 864 |
Source: ICANN Reveal Day announcement, 7 October 2026. These figures cover all application types combined, so do not treat them as a brand-only breakdown.
What the data doesn't tell you
ICANN's snapshot gives no sector breakdown for the brand applications. If you want to know whether banks, carmakers, retailers or pharmaceutical companies dominate, go to the applicant list on ICANN's 2026 Round Application Publication and Statistics website and tag the applicants yourself. That is safer than trusting a sector pie chart from someone's slide deck. It is an afternoon's work, and it tells you which direct competitors filed. We also keep a running summary in our post on the 2026 round applications.
Applications are not delegations. After Reveal Day comes a Replacement Period (8 to 21 October 2026), then String Confirmation Day on 17 November 2026, then a Community Input and Objections Period running to 16 March 2027. ICANN expects the String Evaluation Stage to last 180 days, with a Prioritization Draw on a date still to be determined in the first half of 2027. A .brand applied for today will not be live for some time.
What the 2012 .brand owners did with theirs
The 2012 Round is the only evidence base we have, and it is mixed. The Applicant Guidebook preamble says that round added over 1,200 new gTLDs, a figure repeated by law firm commentary. Many of those were brand strings. The 2026 Round is built on over 300 outputs from the SubPro Final Report, whereas 2012 rested on 19 GNSO policy recommendations from 2007, so the rules are tighter and more specific this time.
I will not give you a count of how many 2012 .brand TLDs were later terminated. I do not have a sourced number and will not guess. What I can say, from how these registries behave, is that the pattern splits roughly three ways:
- Active showpieces. The brand uses the TLD for campaigns, product sites or its main corporate address, and promotes it.
- Quiet defensive holdings. The TLD is delegated, a handful of names exist, and nobody outside the company notices.
- Ended contracts. Some owners decided the running cost and internal effort weren't worth it and terminated their registry agreements.
Study that third group. ICANN publishes registry agreement status for delegated strings, so if you need a real termination count, pull the list of 2012 strings that were brand-type, check which agreements ended, and divide. Do it for your own sector first. It is a sharper due-diligence step than any vendor pitch.
Owners usually stop for a dull reason, not a dramatic one. Nobody inside owns the asset. Marketing launched it, IT runs the DNS, legal holds the contract, and after two years of reshuffles the question "who is using this?" has no answer. The domain is cheap to leave idle and expensive to keep justifying.
What a .brand really costs: a table to fill in
Use the cost table carefully. It has four cost lines, the source for each figure, and the public status of that figure. I am not printing dollar amounts I cannot source. The fee amounts sit in the Applicant Guidebook, which ICANN says covers requirements, evaluation criteria, fees and timelines, so take them from there and from ICANN's own fee pages on the day you budget.
| Cost line | What it covers | Figure to use | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Application (gTLD evaluation) fee | Paid when you apply. If you withdraw in the final 10 days after String Confirmation Day, 65 percent of the evaluation fee paid is refunded (request due by 23:59 UTC on 27 November 2026) | Amount from the fee section of the Applicant Guidebook | Applicant Guidebook V1-2025.12.16, refund terms in ICANN's 7 October 2026 announcement |
| Registry back-end | A Registry Service Provider runs the technical registry services. Every applicant must name one | A range from at least two written RSP quotes. No public price list is published by ICANN | ICANN RSP announcement, 30 January 2026 |
| Ongoing ICANN fees | Recurring fees under the Registry Agreement once the TLD is delegated | Amounts from the Applicant Guidebook and the Registry Agreement you'd sign | Applicant Guidebook V1-2025.12.16 |
| Internal operating cost | Legal and policy work, registration governance, DNS and security oversight, staff time, internal comms | Your own estimate, per year | Internal. Nobody else can supply this line |
The table is a template, not a measurement. Every figure is yours to source before it goes to a finance director.
Reading the table properly
Three things people miss.
First, the refund window is tight. Ten days after String Confirmation Day is the last point at which you get 65 percent of the evaluation fee back. After that, withdrawing costs you more of what you have paid. Decide before 27 November 2026, not after.
Second, the back-end is a contract, not a purchase. ICANN says RSPs provide critical backend technical services and that applicants must specify which RSP will deliver them if the application proceeds to delegation. ICANN also notes that some applicants lack the technical capacity to run these services themselves, which is why the evaluated list exists. Get quotes and compare the scope, because providers package "registry services" very differently.
Third, the internal line is where budgets drift. The first three lines have invoices. The fourth has meetings. If you cannot name an owner, a yearly budget and a review date, the fourth line will quietly become the reason a 2012-style termination happens.
Contention and objections
There is also an exposure outside the table. If another party applied for a similar string, you can end up in a contention set, and the objection process runs through the Community Input and Objections Period to 16 March 2027. Trade mark owners can file a legal rights objection with the World Intellectual Property Organization within 104 days following String Confirmation Day, per the law firm commentary above. If your string looks close to someone else's mark, assume you will need legal time. If someone else's string looks close to yours, that same window is yours.
Where a .brand earns its keep
A .brand only pays back if it does a job a normal domain can't. Three jobs hold up.
Security through an owned namespace
The security case is strongest. Because only you and your authorised parties can register under your TLD, a name ending in your brand is yours by design. Phishing sites cannot register login.yourbrand. That lets you train customers and staff on a simple rule: if it does not end in our TLD, it is not us. It is not a magic shield, since email spoofing and lookalike names on other extensions still exist, but it narrows the problem you would otherwise fight domain by domain.
The catch is adoption. The rule only works if you move your sensitive services onto the TLD and keep them there. A .brand holding a single vanity page gives you almost none of the benefit.
Campaign URLs
Marketing teams usually like short, memorable, on-brand campaign addresses. A product launch at launch.yourbrand is cleaner than a hyphenated .com. Because you control every registration, you never fight a squatter for the obvious name.
Be realistic about the effect. Search engines treat new extensions as ordinary domains, and customers type what they remember. If your audience still defaults to your .com, the campaign URL becomes a redirect. That is fine if you price it as a brand choice, not as an acquisition channel.
Internal tools and systems
The least glamorous use is often the most durable. Staff portals, device management, internal APIs and partner extranets can live on names that are never public and never compete for attention. You also get tidy naming conventions across business units. Nobody tweets about it. It still reduces the number of odd third-party domains your IT team has to track.
If you are choosing between these three, I would defend this order: security first, internal second, campaigns third. Campaigns are the easiest to show a board and the easiest to abandon. For the naming logic underneath, our brand naming process guide covers how to pick a string you can live with for a decade.
Who should not bother
Be blunt about this. A .brand is a long-term operating commitment, not a campaign asset. Skip it if any of these describe you:
- Your brand name isn't settled. If a rebrand, merger or disposal is plausible within a few years, the string is a liability.
- You don't hold clean trademark rights. Specification 13 is tied to a label matching your trademark, so shaky rights mean shaky standing.
- Nobody will own it internally. No named owner, no budget, no roadmap: you'll become the idle TLD in the pattern above.
- Your customers live on `.com` and will keep doing so. If you won't move real services onto the TLD, you're paying for a redirect.
- You only want the name defended. Watching applications and filing objections within the 104-day window may cover your actual risk at lower cost.
If you are not sure your trademark position is clean enough to apply, sort that out first with our brand identity and trademark service.
None of this argues against .brand. For the right company, large, multi-brand, with sensitive customer-facing services and a legal team that likes owning its own namespace, it makes real sense. It argues against doing it because your competitors did. The 333 brand applications show that the move is popular, not that it is right for you.
FAQ
Can a .brand TLD be sold to the public?
Not if you want to keep Specification 13 status. That framework is for single-registrant brand TLDs where registrations go to the operator, its affiliates or authorised trademark licensees, according to the domaindetails.com explainer. If you want to sell names openly, you are in general-TLD territory, with a different set of obligations.
Can I apply if I'm a subsidiary or a division rather than the parent company?
ICANN's eligibility rule says the applicant must be a legal entity such as a corporation or organisation. The entity in your group that should hold the TLD is a legal question about trademark ownership and licensing. Settle it with counsel before you file, because the applicant and the string have to line up.
What happens if my application is in contention with another?
ICANN publishes a list of contention sets alongside the applications and updates it on String Confirmation Day. The Prioritization Draw then sets the order of processing, expected in the first half of 2027 on a date to be set. If you are in a set, talk to counsel about your options rather than waiting for the draw.
Is the application window still open?
No. Submissions ran from 30 April to 12 August 2026. What remains for applicants is the Replacement Period, String Confirmation Day and the objection periods. For everyone else, the question is whether to monitor and object, not whether to apply.
Do I need to run the registry technology myself?
No. ICANN's RSP Evaluation Program exists because some applicants lack the technical capacity to run backend services, and every applicant has to name a provider. You will choose from ICANN's evaluated list, which ICANN says is updated on an ongoing basis.
The most useful fact here is the split between the one-off application fee and the recurring costs that follow it: back-end, ICANN fees and your own people. Price all four lines from written sources before you decide, and set the decision against ICANN's 27 November 2026 refund deadline.