.ro

Register a .ro domain

The Romanian extension, operated by the National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics as RoTLD. Open to any person or company anywhere, and since 1 March 2018 renewed annually rather than held for life.

Extension type: Country-code (ccTLD)
Who can register: Open to anyone
Registry: National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI Bucharest)
Renews at: On request

Check a .ro name

.ro pricing

Live pricing is temporarily unavailable for .ro.

Live pricing is temporarily unavailable. Search the name you want, or ask us and we will quote it.

Before you register .ro

What the price includes: Every .ro amount on this page is resolved by the same pricing engine that charges your cart, at the moment the page is built. There is no separate ICANN fee, agency fee or surcharge added later — the figure you see is the figure you pay, in the currency shown.
Premium and reserved names: Some names are classed as premium by the registry and priced individually, usually at the premium rate every year rather than only the first. Search the exact name to see its own quote. If a name's premium status or price changes between your quote and your purchase, the quote is invalidated rather than quietly repriced.
Renewal is not automatic unless you switch it on: Auto-renew is off unless you enable it, and enabling it sets a flag at the registry rather than scheduling a charge here. We email the registrant address before a name expires, so keep a monitored address on the record. If a .ro name does lapse, restoring it costs considerably more than renewing it would have — the restore price is in the table above.
Transfers: Transferring .ro to us needs the AuthInfo (EPP) code from your current registrar, which they are obliged to give you on request. Where the registry operates a waiting period before a name may move — ICANN imposes one on generic extensions — it is set out in the facts above. That is registry policy, not ours, and we cannot waive it.

Eligibility

Open worldwide, active once payment clears

Registry: National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI Bucharest), operating as RoTLD.

RoTLD's registration rules state that any legal or natural person may register names under .ro regardless of the country they are in. There is no Romanian residency, entity or trustee requirement.
There is no documentary approval step, but the registration form must carry accurate holder details and RoTLD operates a data verification policy against them, so a placeholder identity is a liability rather than a shortcut.
Registration completes only once payment has been confirmed to the registry, which is why .ro is not an extension to buy in the last hour before a launch.
If a registration request fails, RoTLD does not accept a new request for the same name for 32 days.

The rule that changed, and why it still confuses people

.ro is run by ICI Bucharest, the National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics, under the RoTLD name. For most of its life it was unusual among European extensions: you paid once and the name was yours indefinitely, with no renewal date at all. Guides written before 2018 still describe it that way, and buyers still arrive expecting it.

That ended on 1 March 2018, when RoTLD introduced annual registration and maintenance. Names are now registered or renewed for between one and ten years like any other ccTLD. Holders of legacy names were not cut off: the old one-off fee was treated as covering at least five years of maintenance, and names registered before 1 March 2013 were given at least three months of grace, which is why the first expiries landed on 1 June 2018. If you inherited a .ro that someone believes never expires, it has an expiry date now, and it is worth checking it in the registry WHOIS.

What the registry does when payment stops

The .ro lifecycle is blunt. There is no auto-renew grace during which the site keeps working, and no redemption stage with a punitive restore fee. A name whose annual maintenance has not been paid is given pendingDelete status, at which point it stops resolving, and it is deleted automatically 90 days later. Those 90 days are generous compared with a 30-day gTLD redemption period, but the outage starts on day one, so the deadline that matters commercially is the expiry date itself, not the deletion date.

RoTLD permits exactly two things during pendingDelete: renewing, and changing registrar. That second permission is useful and unusual. If a name has lapsed with a registrar you can no longer reach, it can still be moved to us and renewed inside the window rather than being written off. We register .ro through Openprovider and take the transfer authorisation key from RoTLD's own online administration, so the recovery path does not depend on the outgoing registrar co-operating.

Terms and lifecycle

What holding a .ro actually commits you to

Term: One to ten years. This is the fact most often stated wrongly: .ro used to be sold as a one-off registration with no expiry, and RoTLD replaced that with annual registration and maintenance on 1 March 2018. Legacy names were credited with at least five years of maintenance, so the first of them began expiring on 1 June 2018.
If you miss the renewal: An unpaid name is put into pendingDelete status and is deleted automatically 90 days later. It stops working immediately, and RoTLD allows only two operations in that window: renewal, and a change of registrar. There is no separate restore fee stage as on a gTLD, but there is also no functioning website for those 90 days.
Transfer: Transfers use an authorisation key that the holder generates from RoTLD's own online administration for the domain, rather than one issued only by the losing registrar. .ro is a ccTLD, so ICANN's 60-day post-registration lock does not apply, and a change of registrar is permitted even while the name sits in pendingDelete.
Registrant identity: The holder record names the person or organisation holding the right of use, and RoTLD publishes a data verification policy covering it. Changing that right of use is a separate registry operation from moving the name between registrars, and it has a consequence worth planning for: on completion the expiry date is reset and a fresh maintenance period starts from that moment.
Names and characters: RoTLD supports internationalised names using the Romanian diacritics a-breve, a-circumflex, i-circumflex, s-comma and t-comma alongside the usual ASCII set; they are stored as punycode. Disputes are handled by alternative dispute resolution through WIPO or Forum, in Romanian or English.

Fit

Who .ro is for

Trading in Romania
Romanian customers, suppliers and partners expect a .ro address from a business operating locally. It is also the address a Romanian search engine result set is built around.
Companies with Romanian delivery teams
Plenty of Swiss and German firms run development or support out of Bucharest, Cluj or Timisoara. A .ro for the local entity, careers site or support desk reads as a real presence rather than a foreign head office.
Not a general-purpose short name
Because .ro looks like a word ending, it gets bought for domain hacks. That works, but the registry has no IDN-free shortcut and no grace period worth relying on. If Romania is not part of the plan, a .io or a .com will age better.

Hold the global name alongside it

A .ro anchors the Romanian market but travels badly outside it. Most businesses that buy one also hold the .com, so email and brand references work wherever the customer sits.

View .com domains

Frequently asked questions

Is a .ro domain still a one-off lifetime registration?

No. RoTLD introduced annual registration and maintenance on 1 March 2018, and names are now registered or renewed for one to ten years. Older names were credited with at least five years of maintenance, so the earliest of them started expiring from 1 June 2018.

Do I need to be in Romania to register a .ro domain?

No. RoTLD's registration rules allow any legal or natural person to register a .ro name regardless of the country they are in. There is no local presence requirement and no trustee service is needed.

What happens if my .ro domain expires?

It is put into pendingDelete status, stops resolving immediately, and is deleted automatically after 90 days. During that period the only permitted operations are renewal and a change of registrar, so the name can still be recovered before it is released.

Can I move a lapsed .ro domain to you?

Usually yes. A change of registrar is one of the two operations RoTLD allows while a name is in pendingDelete, so a name that has lapsed elsewhere can be transferred and renewed inside the 90 days.

Can I register a .ro domain with Romanian diacritics?

The registry supports internationalised names using a-breve, a-circumflex, i-circumflex, s-comma and t-comma, stored in punycode form and displayed with the diacritics by browsers. Availability through any given registrar varies, so ask us to confirm the exact name before you plan around it.