Buy your .church domain today

A .church domain fits any worshipping community that wants its purpose in the address rather than buried in the page title. Orthodox, Baptist, Mennonite, Pentecostal and Uniting congregations all hold names on the extension today.

It suits new church plants especially well, because a plant rarely inherits a short name on an older extension and the exact words it wants are usually still free here.

Campus ministries, mission organizations and multi-site churches use it the same way, often pairing one name with a subdomain for each location.

No, a .church domain has no faith test, no denominational limit and no verification of any kind. Anyone can register one.

The extension was set up as an ordinary open namespace rather than a restricted community one, which is why it carries no eligibility paperwork. That is different from .catholic, which is run by a Vatican body under community rules.

In practice the openness matters mostly to congregations that assumed there would be an approval process to wait for. There is not one.

A .church domain requires no nonprofit registration, no charity number and no proof of tax-exempt status. The registry asks for none of it.

This is a real difference from .charity, which sits on ICANN’s list of highly regulated extensions and expects registrants to hold the relevant authorizations. .church carries no equivalent duty.

So a congregation still working through its incorporation can secure the name now and sort the paperwork on its own timeline.

Many congregations keep both, and a .church domain works perfectly well alongside an .org rather than replacing it. One address leads and the other redirects to it.

It is worth knowing that .org has never required nonprofit status either. The trust it carries is reputational rather than contractual, which is a weaker argument for keeping it than most people assume.

Large congregations genuinely split on this. Life.Church runs on the extension as its main address, while Elevation Church owns elevation.church and points it at their .org. Owning both and choosing which one leads is a normal answer.

Yes, a .church domain can be pointed at an existing site without rebuilding anything. You update the DNS records, and visitors reach the same pages through the new address.

Many congregations run it the other way round for a while: keep the old address as the one on the noticeboard, and use the .church name in print, on social profiles and in the email footer until it is the one people recall.

If you do redirect an old address, keep renewing it. Letting it lapse hands your congregation’s name to whoever registers it next.

A .church domain costs meaningfully more to renew each year than a .org does, and for a sixty-member congregation run by volunteers that difference is real money.

The renewal is also the number to check rather than the first-year price, which is usually promotional. Set it to renew automatically and put the date in the church calendar alongside everything else the treasurer tracks.

If the annual figure is hard to justify, a shorter name on a cheaper extension serves a congregation perfectly well. The address matters far less than the service times being easy to find.

A .church domain that lapses goes through the standard expiry and redemption stages and then returns to the open market, where anyone may register it.

That is a sharper risk here than on a generic extension, because a lapsed congregation name is an obvious and specific thing for someone to pick up. Recovering it afterwards depends entirely on the new holder.

Keep the contact details on the registration current and pointed at a role inbox rather than one person’s account. Church admin turns over, and a renewal notice sent to a former volunteer’s address is the usual way these names are lost.