What happens if you don't renew your domain: the real timelines

Anyone asking this question has usually already heard a vague version of the answer: "you get thirty days," "you get sixty days," "after a month it's gone." The trouble is there's no single rule for every domain. For .it domains, the full answer is written out in the .it Registry's own regulation and technical guidelines; for .com, .net and other generic extensions it's ICANN that writes it, and even there the number isn't always the same.

The .it domain: what the Registry actually says

When a .it domain reaches its expiry date, it doesn't stop immediately. It enters a 15-day window that the .it Registry's Technical Guidelines (version 3.3, in force since 15 July 2026) call autoRenewPeriod: for these 15 days the registrar is required to keep the DNS delegation active, so the site and email keep working exactly as before, and the domain can still be renewed at the normal price, with no penalty.

Things only change if, after those 15 days, the registrar goes ahead and deletes the registration. From that point the domain enters a second state, pendingDelete/redemptionPeriod, for up to another 30 days: here DNS is switched off, so the site and email genuinely stop working, and the only operation still possible is recovery by the same registrar that deleted the domain, at the request of whoever was the registrant. Neither the regulation nor the technical guidelines set a surcharge for this operation: the fee is set freely by each registrar, which is one more reason to ask your own provider about it in advance.

If those 30 days also pass without recovery, the domain moves into the pendingDelete/pendingDelete state, where no operation is possible any more, and it is then permanently deleted according to public lists the Registry updates every night on its own site: from that moment anyone can register it again. In total, a .it domain is genuinely recoverable by its former registrant for about 45 days after expiry: 15 in which the site stays online, and another 30 in which it's offline but not yet lost for good.

The .com domain (and other gTLDs): ICANN's rules

For generic domains, the source isn't a single national registry but ICANN, the organisation that coordinates the rules for .com, .net, .org and most other extensions not tied to a single country. Its Expired Registration Recovery Policy, in the version that has been in force since 21 February 2024, requires every registrar to send at least two notices before expiry, one about a month before and one about a week before, plus a third notice if the domain hasn't been renewed or deleted within 5 days of the expiry date.

Here, though, the answer changes compared with a .it domain: ICANN doesn't impose the same number of days for everyone before the actual deletion. The registrar can delete an expired registration at any time; the only constraint is that the DNS resolution interruption, the point at which the site genuinely stops responding, must cover at least the last 8 consecutive days during which the domain is still renewable. In practice, how many days you really have left before a .com goes dark isn't set by one uniform rule, but by the contract with whichever registrar you chose, which can be more lenient or quicker than another.

Once deletion does happen, though, the rule becomes uniform again: nearly all unsponsored gTLDs apply a 30-day Redemption Grace Period, the same length as the one that applies to .it domains, during which DNS stays switched off and recovery is only possible through the same registrar that deleted the registration, at the request of whoever was the registrant.

What actually matters if you run a business

The real risk isn't losing the domain on the exact day it expires, which almost never happens: it's letting the renewal notice go unnoticed, perhaps because it lands in an inbox nobody at the company checks any more, and finding out weeks later that the site and email have stopped working. Besides turning on auto-renewal with your registrar, it's worth checking that the contact registered on the domain is actually the right one: it's the same check that tells you who the real registrant of your domain is, which I wrote about in who really owns your website and domain: how to check, and it's that person who receives the notices and has the right to ask for recovery if something goes wrong.

For anyone with a .com domain, it's also worth asking your registrar directly what its own deletion timeline looks like: that's not an idle question, since ICANN leaves each provider free to decide exactly when an expired domain actually gets deleted.

If you'd like a check on how your domain and its renewal dates are currently managed, that's part of the digital check-up: otherwise get in touch and let's look at where things stand.