Domain name registration WHOIS is the public record of a domain’s registration: which registrar manages it, when it was created, when it expires, which nameservers it uses, what status codes apply to it and, where the data is not redacted, who registered it. The name comes from the WHOIS protocol, the decades-old lookup system that served this data. For generic top-level domains such as .com, .org and .net, ICANN retired the WHOIS requirement on January 28, 2025, and RDAP (the Registration Data Access Protocol) became the official way to retrieve the same registration data. Most people still call it “WHOIS,” and the underlying record works the same way.
What Happens When You Register a Domain
Three parties are involved in every registration. The registrant is the person or organization that holds the domain. The registrar is the ICANN-accredited company that sells the registration and manages the account, such as GoDaddy, Namecheap or Squarespace. The registry is the operator of the top-level domain itself, such as Verisign for .com, and it maintains the authoritative list of every name in that extension. Our guide to registrar versus registry explains the split in more detail.
When you register a domain, you give the registrar your name, organization, postal address, email address and phone number. The registrar records that contact data, sends the domain name, nameservers and dates to the registry, and publishes the registration record through its lookup service. Under ICANN’s 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement, the registrar must also verify your email address or phone number within 15 days of registration or of a change to your contact details. If you do not respond to the verification request, the registrar can suspend the domain until you do.
The scale of this system is large. There were 386.9 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains at the end of 2025, according to Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief for the fourth quarter of 2025. Each one has a registration record.
What a WHOIS Record Contains
A registration record follows a standard set of fields. The labels vary slightly between lookup tools, but the content is consistent.
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Registrar and IANA ID | The company that manages the domain, and its unique ICANN accreditation number. |
| Creation date | When the current, unbroken registration began. It does not change when the domain is sold or transferred. |
| Updated date | When the record last changed, for any reason. |
| Expiration date | When the current registration term ends unless it is renewed. |
| Nameservers | The DNS servers that answer for the domain and determine where its website and email go. |
| Domain status | EPP status codes such as clientTransferProhibited, which show what actions are currently blocked. |
| Registrant organization and country | Often still visible; the organization field shows a company name if one was entered. |
| Registrant name, address, email and phone | Usually redacted for privacy; a web form or anonymized email may be offered instead. |
| DNSSEC | Whether the domain is cryptographically signed. |
For a beginner, the three most useful fields are the registrar, which tells you where the domain is managed; the expiration date, which is covered in our guide to the domain name registration expiration date; and the status codes, which tell you whether the domain is locked against transfer.
Why Most WHOIS Records Are Now Redacted
For most of the internet’s history, WHOIS records displayed the registrant’s full name, street address, email address and phone number to anyone who asked. That changed in May 2018, when the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect and ICANN required registrars to redact personal data from public gTLD records. Most registrars chose to redact every registrant’s data, not just the data of Europeans.
The effect was immediate and lasting. Publicly available contact data fell from 82% of gTLD records in 2010 and 75.7% in April 2018 to 13.5% in 2020, according to the Interisle Consulting Group’s WHOIS Contact Data Availability and Registrant Classification Study. By late 2023 and early 2024, only 10.8% of gTLD domains had identifying contact data for the actual registrant available, per the Interisle gTLD Registration Contact Data Study (June 2024). Redaction is the reason a lookup today rarely tells you who owns a domain, and it is the reason paid privacy services matter less than they once did, as our article on whether private registration for domain names is necessary explains.
Redaction did not erase the past. Records captured before 2018 survive in third-party WHOIS history archives, which is why investigators often look backward to identify a registrant the current record hides. Our guide to domain name registration history covers how that works.
From WHOIS to RDAP: The January 28, 2025 Sunset
WHOIS was designed in the early 1980s as a simple text protocol. It returned plain text in whatever layout each server chose, it had no standard way to handle non-English characters, and it could not distinguish between a member of the public and an authorized investigator. RDAP was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to fix those limitations. It returns structured data in JSON format, uses standard web technology (HTTPS), supports internationalized names, and can support different levels of access for different users.
ICANN phased RDAP in through a contract amendment. The amendment to the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement took effect on August 7, 2023, the RDAP ramp-up period ended on February 3, 2024, and the document lists January 28, 2025 as the “WHOIS Services Sunset Date,” after which registrars were no longer obligated to provide registration data over port-43 and web-based WHOIS, according to ICANN’s reminder on the effective date of the 2013 RAA global amendment.
Two points confuse beginners. First, the sunset applies to gTLDs. Country-code domains such as .uk, .de or .ca follow their own registry rules, and many still operate WHOIS servers. Second, the sunset retired a protocol, not the data. The same registration record still exists and is still public in the same redacted form; it is simply delivered through RDAP. RDAP infrastructure is also more concentrated than the number of registrars suggests: a 2021 ICANN measurement, taken before the sunset, found 4,136 registrars offering RDAP through only 242 unique base URLs, according to Carlos Gañán’s RDAP performance study (IFIP TMA 2021). For a full comparison, see RDAP vs WHOIS, and for practical lookup options after the change, our post on how you can still look up who owns a domain.
How to Look Up a Domain’s Registration Data
The simplest starting point is ICANN’s own lookup tool at lookup.icann.org. Enter the domain name, and the tool queries the correct registry and registrar RDAP servers and displays the result. Most registrars and many registries also offer their own lookup pages. Command-line users can still use the traditional whois command for extensions that operate WHOIS servers, and RDAP clients are available for gTLDs.
When you read the result, check the registrar first, then the expiration date, then the status codes and nameservers. If the registrant fields are redacted, the record will usually offer a contact form or an anonymized email address that forwards to the registrant. If you have a legitimate need for the redacted data, such as a trademark claim or a security investigation, you can submit a disclosure request to the registrar, either directly or through ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service. Disclosure is not guaranteed, and it is often slow.
Who Uses WHOIS Data and Why It Still Matters
Registration data is not only for domain owners. Security teams use it to connect phishing domains to the same operator. Brand owners use it to identify who registered a domain confusingly similar to their trademark. Buyers use it to confirm that a seller actually holds the domain on offer. Law enforcement uses it as a starting point for investigations. Redaction has made all of this harder: in a 2021 survey of 277 cyber-investigators, 94% said redaction impairs their ability to investigate relationships between domains and actors, according to the M3AAWG and APWG WHOIS user survey.
Keeping Your Own Registration Data Accurate
Your own registration record matters most when something goes wrong. The registrant email address receives renewal notices, transfer confirmations and security alerts. The registrant name and organization establish who owns the domain if it is ever disputed or stolen. An out-of-date email address is one of the most common reasons domains expire unnoticed, and an agency’s or former employee’s name in the registrant field is one of the most common reasons ownership disputes begin.
Updating the record is straightforward. Sign in to your registrar account, open the domain’s settings, and find the section labeled contact information or registrant details. Make sure the registrant name is your legal name or your organization’s legal name, and that the email address is one your organization will control for years, ideally a shared role address rather than one person’s inbox. Save the change and respond to any verification email the registrar sends. Some registrars confirm a change of registrant through both the old and new email addresses, and some apply a temporary transfer lock after the change. Our explanation of registrant, admin, tech and billing contacts describes what each role controls.
How DNAccess Helps
When a registration record does not answer the question you need answered, such as who really owns a domain, who owned it before, or whether a seller’s claim holds up, our domain name background check combines current RDAP data, historical WHOIS records and DNS history into a single report. We use the same research when we recover stolen domains and when we support counsel in domain disputes. Contact us if you need a domain’s registration record examined.
This article is part of the DNAccess Domain Name Basics guides, which explain how domain names, registrars and DNS work in plain English.