2026-08-17
Where Registrar Domain Counts Come From
On the price comparison pages — .COM, for example — every registrar occupies a table row that can be expanded. Among other things, the expanded row shows an ICANN Accreditation Details block, and inside it a gTLD Domains Under Management line: a domain count, an IANA ID, and the month the data refers to. Below is where that figure comes from, what it includes, and why it carries the qualifiers it does.
Source: ICANN Domain Metrica
The domain count comes straight from ICANN, from its Domain Metrica service. These are official statistics published by the organization that accredits registrars.
Any value can be checked independently. An account is required first — it is created at domainmetrica.icann.org. After signing in, the search page is domainmetrica.icann.org/search: the Registrar type is selected and the registrar name entered, which opens a card showing gTLD DUM (domains under management), the date of the last update, and the IANA ID.
What the gTLD Domains Under Management line shows
Back on the price comparison pages of tldes.com, that Domain Metrica value is what the ICANN Accreditation Details block displays. The number leaves out two things.
Only gTLDs are counted, country domains are not
ICANN collects reporting data only for generic top-level domains (gTLDs): .com, .net, .org, .xyz, .shop, and hundreds of others.
Country-code domains (ccTLDs) — .de, .co.uk, .ru, .nl, .fr, and every other two-letter extension — do not enter these statistics at all. They are run by national registry operators, each with its own rules, and those operators do not report to ICANN.
The practical consequence: for a registrar whose business is built on country domains, the real portfolio can be several times larger than the figure shown. European registrars with a large share of .de or .nl are a typical case.
A registrar can hold more than one accreditation
An IANA ID is an ICANN accreditation number. It appears in the whois record of any domain, in the Registrar IANA ID field, and ICANN publishes the full list of accredited registrars. The number identifies an accreditation, not a company — and Domain Metrica counts domains per accreditation too. One company can hold several, for two reasons.
Catching expiring domains. When a domain is not renewed, it returns to general availability and goes to whoever registers it first. Registries cap the number of simultaneous attempts allowed per accreditation, so extra accreditations are set up for this kind of catching — known as drop-catching — running into the hundreds at some companies and past a thousand at the largest. Even so, around nine out of ten registrars listed on this site hold just one IANA ID.
Brand groups and acquisitions. A large company may hold several working accreditations at once: separate retail brands, a dedicated reseller arm, a corporate division, a registrar acquired together with its business, a separate legal entity in another country. Domains are then spread across several IANA IDs, all of them genuine. This is where the figure understates the real size of the business — it shows one accreditation out of several.
What this means
The number in the gTLD Domains Under Management line is not "how many domains a registrar has in total". More precisely, it is the number of gTLD domains attributed to one specific accreditation in the month shown. Country domains are excluded, and if a company holds several accreditations, only one of them is counted.
The figure gives a sense of scale — whether a registrar is large, mid-sized, or quite small. It is not suited to precise comparisons between companies, or to conclusions about market share. The source is cited so that any value can be verified.