.de domains: DENIC, and checking without RDAP

The registry is a cooperative of registrars

IANA lists DENIC eG, a cooperative based in Frankfurt, as the manager of .de. Names are registered directly beneath the extension — company.de — with no equivalent of the British .co.uk layer.

DENIC keeps the registry; its members and other registrars handle sales. The policy applies identically no matter where you buy.

You cannot confirm availability through RDAP

We checked the IANA bootstrap file, the official directory of RDAP servers: DENIC has no entry. There is no public registry service that will state plainly that a name is free.

What remains is a DNS check — whether the name has name servers. If it does, the domain is certainly taken. If it does not, it is probably free, with no guarantee: a registered but unused domain looks exactly the same.

For .de, treat a probably available result as a strong hint and confirm with a registrar before building anything around the name.

The price does not jump in year two

At a Polish registrar .de costs 45 PLN net to register and 48 PLN to renew (August 2026) — a difference of three złoty.

That says something useful about markets rather than about Germany. .nl renews at the same price it registers, so does .fr and so does .it. The Polish pattern, where renewal costs three and a half times the first year, is the exception rather than the rule — and over five years it makes .de cheaper than it first appears.

Before you register

DENIC publishes requirements for permitted characters and for connecting the domain to name servers. National characters are supported, though the encoded form of the label still has to fit DNS length limits.

Do not carry over what you know from .com or .uk. Transfer procedures, holder data and renewal handling are set by DENIC independently, and its own documentation is the only binding source.