UK domain sales: what 24,675 auction results show

Half of the expired .uk domain names sold at drop auction since February 2009 went for £102 or less. One in four sold for £342 or more, and fewer than one in 250 reached £10,000. Those figures come from 24,675 sales reported by the DomainLore auction venue between 27 February 2009 and 30 September 2026, which DropOps analysed for this study.

Many published lists of UK domain sales give a name, a price and a venue, then stop. Few say how the sales were collected, whether a figure is a confirmed payment or a closing bid, or what was left out. This article puts those things alongside the results, because without them the results can't be read properly.

The short version of the limits: every sale here is one kind of transaction, at one venue. The data describes the market for expired .uk names sold at auction shortly after they drop. It is not the whole UK domain aftermarket, and it says nothing about private, brokered or marketplace sales.

The sales come from DropOps' sale warehouse, which keeps one canonical record per sale even when the same sale has been reported more than once. To count as a price, a record had to pass the same rule DropOps applies wherever it uses a sale as price evidence:

• it is a real sale record, not a synthetic or test row;
• the basis on which it was recorded is still active, and any conflict between reports has been resolved;
• at least one qualifying report supports it;
• the asset is a domain name, or a bundle or portfolio of names, rather than a website or business;
• its disclosure class is "verified" or "reported", never a closing bid;
• it has a sale date and a price above zero.

We then kept only UK endings and sales dated on or before 30 September 2026. Prices are nominal pounds at the time of sale, so a £100 sale in 2010 and a £100 sale in 2026 count the same, with no adjustment for inflation. Percentiles are continuous (interpolated between neighbouring sales) and rounded to the nearest pound. "Length" means the number of characters before the first dot: in a name such as example-domain.test, the label is 14 characters.

The query only reads data. We extracted the figures on 7 October 2026; a later run could differ slightly if sales dated on or before 30 September are added or corrected after that date.

Of 24,816 UK sale records dated up to 30 September 2026, 141 were closing bids from UK Backorder auctions where payment was not confirmed. We excluded all of them. A closing bid records what the highest bidder offered when an auction ended. It does not show that the bidder paid, or that the name changed hands at that figure. Counting it as a price would mix offers with transactions, so in this study a closing bid is never treated as a sale price.

No other dated UK record failed the test, so the 24,675 sales that remain are exactly the DomainLore records in the "verified" and "reported" classes. All come from that one venue, and all are drop auctions. The disclosure class is "verified" for 24,028 and "reported" for 647. That class describes how the venue disclosed each sale. It does not mean DropOps has checked the payment: we record these prices as reported, and we have not verified any of them ourselves.

What isn't in the data matters as much as what is. Private sales between two parties, sales arranged by brokers, and sales on marketplaces where a seller sets the price are all absent. So are sales of established websites. Many of those transactions involve names that never expired, and none of them appears here. Nothing in this dataset tells you what they sell for.

The £50 cluster

The most striking feature is the floor. The 10th and 25th percentiles are both £50, and only 164 sales (0.66%) came in below it. Put those together and at least 24% of all sales, roughly one in four, sit at £50. The wider £50–£99 band holds 11,744 sales, 47.59% of the total. Fewer than one sale in three (31.6%) reached £250.

We don't know why so many sales sit at £50. It may reflect a starting price at the venue, but this dataset records neither starting prices nor bid counts, so we can't test that. What the cluster does tell you is practical: in this market a £50 result is common, not an outlier, and a name selling at the floor says little about the names that don't.

Mean versus median

The mean sale price is £443, more than four times the median of £102. That gap is the signature of a skewed market: a small number of large sales pull the average up while the typical sale sits far below it. Nine in ten sold for £930 or less. At the other end, 2,293 sales (9.3%) reached £1,000 or more, the top 1% were £5,000 or more, and 96 sales (0.39%) reached £10,000 or more. The single highest was £79,232.

We haven't named that domain. One exceptional result says nothing about what a typical name fetches, and an average dragged up by results like it would overstate the typical price by a factor of four. When someone quotes an "average" .uk sale price, ask whether it is a mean or a median.

.co.uk accounts for three in four sales (18,433, or 74.7%), so its median of £110 sits close to the overall figure. The shorter .uk ending shared the £50 lower quartile but sold for less from the median up: a median of £80 and a 90th percentile of £500, against £110 and £950 for .co.uk.

.org.uk is the surprise. It has the highest median (£145) and the widest upper range, with one sale in ten at £1,549 or more. We didn't classify names by meaning, so we can't say what drives that. It would be a mistake to conclude that an .org.uk name is worth more than the same word in .co.uk: these are different names sold on different days, and the comparison is between groups, not like-for-like pairs.

.me.uk has only 10 sales. That is too few to read anything into, which is why we don't comment on its figures.

The bands are not equal in size. There were 2,440 sales of names with one to three characters, 1,006 with four, 1,136 with five, 1,397 with six, 3,576 with seven or eight, 3,841 with nine or ten, 6,308 with 11 to 14, and 4,971 with 15 or more.

At the median, shorter labels sold for more: £210 for one to three characters, £150 for four, £121 for five, falling to £80 for 9–14 characters. Names of three characters or fewer were also the only group whose 25th percentile was above £50 (it was £90).

Two details complicate the simple story. First, the upper tail doesn't follow the median. The 90th percentile for four-character names (£1,391) and five-character names (£1,236) is higher than for names of three characters or fewer (£856). Second, long names didn't keep falling: names of 15 or more characters had a higher median (£90) and a higher 90th percentile (£1,050) than names of 9–14. We measured length, not meaning, so we can't say whether that reflects descriptive phrases attracting bidders or something else. Length is one property of a name. It is not the reason anyone bids.

Letters-only names make up 93.6% of sales, so they set the overall figures. Hyphenated names had a slightly higher median (£110) and 75th percentile (£431). That isn't evidence that a hyphen raises a price: the hyphenated group is small, and its names differ from the rest in other ways, length among them. All-digit names sold for less at the median (£60), but with only 48 sales the figure is fragile.

For sixteen years the median barely moved. It wandered between £60 and £120 with no steady trend, and the 25th percentile was £50 in every year from 2009 to 2025. Then two things changed at once. The number of recorded sales jumped, from 1,324 in 2024 to 3,503 in 2025 and 4,093 in the first nine months of 2026, and prices rose with it: a median of £150 in 2025 and £370 so far in 2026. In 2026 the 25th percentile moved off £50 for the first time, to £90, and the 75th percentile reached £900. Together, 2025 and 2026 account for 7,596 sales, nearly a third of the whole dataset.

We can describe this rise. We can't explain it from this data. It could reflect stronger demand for expired .uk names, a different mix of names reaching auction, changes at the venue, or changes in which sales were reported and recorded, and each would produce a similar-looking chart. Three cautions follow. Yearly counts reflect the sales DomainLore reported and DropOps recorded, not the size of the market in that year. The 2026 figure covers nine months and may move by the end of the year. And because volume and price changed together, it would be unsafe to treat 2026's median as the new normal for every name.

The data also gives no sign of a simple link to Nominet's 2022 change to the expiry process, under which .uk names have, since 13 September 2022, dropped at a specified time published in a daily drop list. Medians in 2023 and 2024 (£70 each) sat within the range of the years before it; the rise came more than two years later. The process is due to change again when .uk moves to a standardised registry on 9 February 2027. How the drop works today is explained in our guide to expired and dropping .uk domains.

• One venue. Every sale was reported by DomainLore. Other auction venues, and other ways of selling, may show different prices.
• One kind of sale. All sales are drop auctions of expired names. Private, brokered and marketplace sales are not included, and neither are website sales.
• Reported, not verified by DropOps. We rely on the venue's disclosures. The "verified" disclosure class describes the source, not a check we have made.
• Nominal prices. There is no inflation adjustment, so older prices look lower than they would in today's money.
• No bid counts or starting prices. We can't say how contested a sale was, or why so many prices sit at £50.
• Uneven years. The first year is partial, 2026 covers nine months, and 2025–26 hold nearly a third of all sales, so whole-period figures lean towards recent years.
• Length and characters only. We didn't classify names by meaning: whether a label is a dictionary word, a place, a brand or a phrase is not measured here.
• Rounding. Percentiles are rounded to whole pounds.

Sales data is most useful as a set of comparables and least useful as a single number.

Compare like with like. A drop-auction result tells you what bidders at that venue paid for that name on that day. It is a fair reference for another expired name heading to auction, and a poor one for a name you are negotiating to buy privately from an owner who is still using it, which is a different kind of transaction that this dataset does not cover. Before you lean on any published figure, find out whether it is a completed sale or a closing bid: a closing bid is an offer at the end of an auction, and if payment was never made the name may never have changed hands at that price.

Use a range, not a point. The middle half of all sales sits between £50 and £342, a wide band, and within any segment the 25th and 75th percentiles tell you more than the median alone. Above all, don't mistake the median for a valuation. £102 is the middle of a distribution of thousands of different names. It isn't what "a .uk domain is worth", and it isn't what your name is worth.

Worked example

Suppose you're bidding on an expired, seven-letter, letters-only .co.uk name. This is an illustration of method, not a valuation. The study gives you three reference points. For all names of seven or eight characters, the middle half of sales fell between £50 and £310, with a median of £97. For .co.uk as a whole, the median was £110 and the 75th percentile £360. And across all names in 2026 so far, the median has been £370.

Those numbers pull in different directions, which is the point. The long-run figures say three in four names of that length have sold for £310 or less; the recent figures say the whole market has moved up. Neither tells you whether this particular name is one of the few that reach four figures. For that, look for sales of names that share its actual qualities (the same or a similar word, the same ending, a recent date), and check that each is a confirmed sale rather than a closing bid. Recorded UK sales can be browsed on sold domains, and our guide to researching a .uk domain before you buy covers the checks that sit alongside price.

Expired .uk names sold at drop auction are, for the most part, inexpensive. Half sold for £102 or less, roughly a quarter at £50, and nine in ten for £930 or less. A thin tail sold for thousands: 96 sales reached £10,000 or more, and the highest was £79,232. Shorter labels and .org.uk names did better at the median; the .uk ending did worse. After sixteen flat years, recorded prices rose sharply in 2025 and 2026, for reasons this data can't identify.

Just as important is what the data doesn't show: anything about private, brokered or marketplace sales, any check by DropOps that the reported prices were paid, and anything about what an individual name is worth. If you plan to build on a name you buy at auction, how to repurpose an old domain safely covers what comes next.