Most domain names are worth little, and a few are worth a fortune; the difference is the extension, the length, and whether the words mean something a business would pay for. In 2024 to 2026 the median publicly reported .com sale was about $5,000, while most names in the largest for-sale portfolios are priced under $5,000. An appraisal gives you a retail range with the reasoning behind it, so you know which side of that line your name is on.
Short answer: a domain is worth what the right buyer would pay for the name alone, and for most registered domains that is under a few thousand dollars. A short, meaningful .com can be worth five, six or seven figures. The value lives in the name, not in the registration, and not in the website you may have built on it.
Below is what moves the number, what does not, and how to get a figure you can actually use when you sell, respond to an offer, or put the name on a balance sheet.
Three numbers from our own data set the scale. They come from publicly reported sales and from a census of for-sale inventory we ran in October 2026, all brought to 2025 dollars.
Reported sales skew high, because nobody reports a $50 sale and many large sales are private. Read the median as the middle of the names that are good enough to sell at all. The typical registered domain never sells, and that is the honest baseline for "what is my domain worth": zero, until the name has one of the qualities below.
The extension. .com carries the premium in almost every category. In our reported-sales corpus for 2024 to 2026, .com accounts for 69% of sales and 77% of the dollars. A good name in .net, .org, .io or .co is worth a fraction of the same name in .com, with .ai the one extension that currently trades at .com-like prices for AI-relevant words.
Length and word count. One real word beats two, two beat three. Short letter and number combinations have their own markets (three-letter .coms are a recognised asset class). Every extra word or syllable narrows the set of businesses that would want the name.
Meaning and commercial intent. Does the name describe a product, a service, a category or a feeling a company would want to own? Words people search for and pay to advertise against are worth more than words nobody buys. "Insurance" is worth more than "insular".
Brandability. Easy to say, easy to spell when heard, no ambiguity ("for" or "4"?), no awkward letter pairs. Invented names can be valuable when they sound like a brand already; most made-up strings are not.
Comparable sales. What similar names, in the same extension and of similar quality, have actually sold for. This is the evidence an appraisal is built on, and the evidence a buyer will use against you if you ignore it.
Domains are hyper-illiquid. A domain investor might pay 10% to 30% of the retail figure for a quick wholesale flip, while the one company that needs the name might pay the top of the range or more. We show the retail band and explain it, so you can decide where to price depending on how long you are willing to wait. Our methodology page covers the difference between a compass and a price tag.
A single valuation also carries noise. When we appraised more than 1,200 domains five times each, the typical gap between a name's highest and lowest single run was 29%. That is why every $19.99 report is a consensus: five independent valuations, highest and lowest dropped, the middle three converged into one range.
We have produced more than 400,000 appraisals, and we publish how our pre-sale reports compared with the sales that followed, misses included, on the accuracy gallery.
Partly. If someone has already run a public appraisal of your domain on Appraise.net, entering it on our homepage shows that report free. Otherwise a new report is $19.99 with no account. Free estimators from registrars return a number for anything you type, but they do not explain it, and they tend to give similar figures to very different names.
Only a little. Age matters when it comes with a history: an established site, inbound links, or a brand people remember. A twenty-year-old name that was never used is valued on the name itself, the same as a new registration of the same words would be.
If the traffic comes from people typing the name in, yes, because that is proof the name has demand. Traffic that comes from a website you built belongs to the website, not the name, and a buyer of the bare domain will not pay for it.
Because domains are illiquid. The same name sells for very different amounts depending on whether a domain investor buys it wholesale or the business that needs it buys it retail. The range is the retail band; a quick sale usually closes below it.
What a motivated end user, the business or person for whom this name is the perfect fit, would reasonably pay in a well-run sale. It is not a guaranteed price and not what a reseller will pay you this week. Our methodology page explains the distinction.
One domain, $19.99, no account needed. Five independent valuations converged into one range, with the reasoning, strengths, weaknesses and comparable sales behind it.
Appraise my domain for $19.99