If you want to know how to check a domain expiration date, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, I will show you not only how you can do it but also how it works and some best practices. In order to check a domain expiration date, we have to perform a whois check, so I’ll also explain how that works.
Usually around that whois check, someone built a domain expiration checker and that’s how the term domain expiry checker was coined.
How do domain expiration dates work?
Before going through a few examples of how you can check domain expiration dates, why not establish how these dates work in the first place? It’s very simple. A domain expiration date is established based on the date a domain name is registered. So if you register a domain name today, and all domain renewals are annual (you can’t register a domain name for a month or a day), then the expiration date will be a year from now.
You can also register a domain name for two, three, and up to ten years in advance. If you registered the domain name today for ten years, the domain expiration date for that domain name would be ten years from now. Why would someone register a domain name ten years in advance? It costs only $10 annually, and unintentional domain expirations still happen. Therefore, if you register a domain name for ten years, you are set during that time period, and a domain name will not expire before the ten years are up.
Programmer checking domain expiration dates
How can I check a domain expiration date?
To check a domain expiration date for a single domain name, you need to check the whois record for that domain name. There are several ways you can do a whois check.
- Visit your favorite domain registrar or designated Registry
- Ask a whois data provider such as WhoAPI
- Build your own domain expiry checker
Let’s go briefly through both of these options.
Domain registrar whois record check
You would do a whois record check with a domain registrar for two reasons. You could check a domain name that you registered with this domain registrar, or you want to find out when someone else’s domain name is about to expire. If you need to check when your domain name will expire, there is an easier way. All you need to do is log in to the domain registrar where you purchased the domain name.
Checking expiration dates for domain names
As you can see, if you want to check a domain expiration date for a domain name that you own, you don’t need to do a whois record check. All you have to do is log in and list your domain names. Usually, this is done in a domain portfolio section. In the image above, you see what a domain portfolio looks like in my GoDaddy account, and I have highlighted where you can see the domain expiration dates.
How to check domain expiration dates on GoDaddy?
In the screenshot above, I showed you how you can check domain expiration dates for domain names that you registered at GoDaddy. Now I will show you how you can check domain expiration dates that you do not own. Later, I will show you how you can do that check with a whois provider on a larger scale for millions of domain names. Let’s see how we can find out when a single domain name expires.
You need to open GoDaddy’s whois page and enter the domain name that you want to check expiration dates. Check the image below. Obviously, don’t type in “yourdomain.com” type the domain name you want to check expiration dates for.
Checking domain expiration dates with GoDaddy whois
Once you do that, and after you click the button “Search,” you will get a whois record that shows you various information about a domain name, including domain expiration dates. In case you want to see how this is supposed to look, check the image below, and read on for more details.
What if I don’t remember where I registered that domain name?
If you are not sure where you registered that domain name, then you first need to find out where the domain name is registered. You can do that with a whois record check. Once you do a whois record check, you will find out where the domain name is registered and when it expires. Just a reminder that I am still talking about checking the whois record on any domain registrar. Yes, any domain registrar. It doesn’t matter if you do a whois check on a GoDaddy website for a domain name that is, in fact, registered with Namecheap or vice versa.
So, let’s do just that! Let’s check a whois record for namecheap.com on GoDaddy’s whois page. This will give us much information about the domain name, including the expiration date and registrar name. You can see in the screenshot below that we are searching the WHOIS Database for the domain name namecheap.com. After that, we have the Whois search results for the domain name; NAMECHEAP.COM. Then you can find the registrar’s name and registry expiry date. In the case of the domain name namecheap.com, it’s 2026-08-11. The format here is YYYY-MM-DD, so that would be the year 2026, the month of August, and the 11th day.
GoDaddy Whois lookup example
I would recommend that, like namecheap.com, you renew your important domain names for longer than one year. Unintentional domain expirations still happen, and it’s better to be safe than sorry. What’s $10 in the grand scheme of things? Yes, even the largest companies in the world have their .com domain names, and it costs them $10 to renew them. Just think about it, apple.com, amazon.com, and google.com renew for $10 for one year.
If you are wondering what the expiration date for these heavyweights is, let’s take a look.
apple.com – “date_expires”: “2024-02-20 05:00:00”,
google.com – “date_expires“: “2028-09-14 04:00:00”
microsoft.com – “date_expires“: “2024-05-03 04:00:00”,
amazon.com – “date_expires“: “2024-10-31 04:00:00”,
adobe.com – “date_expires“: “2023-05-17 01:48:14”,
This leads me to the second option I’ve mentioned. Checking many domain names for expiration dates by using a Whois record data provider. We will get to that in a minute. Right now, I want to show you something else.
How to check domain expiration dates on Namecheap
As promised, earlier, I showed you how to check domain expiration dates on GoDaddy, and there we checked NAMECHEAP.COM. Now, we will consult the Namecheap whois page and check the expiration dates for the domain name godaddy.com. In the image below, you can see what that looks like.
Namecheap Whois Lookup example
The process is almost identical. You open the Namecheap whois page and type any domain name in the box. Click “Search,” and you will get a Whois record for the domain name you searched for. As you can see, godaddy.com has the expiration date of Registry Expiry Date: 2024-11-01T11:59:59Z. Again, the date format is the year, month, and day, so the domain name godaddy.com will expire on the 1st of January 2024.
Checking a domain expiration date through a Whois data provider
Several companies provide insights into whois records. You could do a single domain check, or you could programmatically check millions of domain names. For example, I logged into my WhoAPI account and made five manual domain checks.
These are the five domain names I mentioned earlier, so naturally, I don’t own these domains. You could check the expiration date for any domain name. The beauty of Whois API, on the other hand, is that you can make domain expiration date checks programmatically. That means you could check millions of domain names and their expiration dates. There are many other useful ways you could use a Whois API, but let’s stick to checking domain expiration dates.
Let’s quickly go through the steps of checking a domain expiration date with WhoAPI. Log in to https://my.whoapi.com
WhoAPI Log in page
Once you log in, you can access the console and make API requests. In the parameter value box, type any domain name. Once you type the domain name you want to check expiration dates, click the API Request button. I have attached another screenshot below of how you do that. The screenshot was taken after I clicked the “API Request” button, so you will also see the parsed Whois record. In this particular example, I have checked the whois record for the domain name icann.org
We can also see the expiration date in this parsed whois record for the domain name icann.org. It is “date_expires”: “2027-12-07 17:04:26”, that’s 7th December 2027.
Checking the domain expiration date for icann.org
Before proceeding, let’s quickly summarize. With a Whois data provider, you can check domain expiration dates one by one, just like I did in the example above with those popular .com domain names. And you can write code and check millions of domain names. If you are a developer and want to try it, we have some examples of how to do it in PHP, Python, Javascript, Ruby, and other popular programming languages.
Our Whois API responds in JSON and XML. This is important because a whois record is pure text. It’s human-readable (not machine-readable). The text of the Whois record you saw in the screenshot above (checking the domain expiration date for namecheap.com on GoDaddy’s Whois page) is just that. A text. Your software doesn’t see any data there. It just sees letters in a text.
At WhoAPI, we parse this chunk of text to become machine-readable. That way, software or an application knows that something is a domain expiration date, and some other piece of text is actually a domain registrar, and that other piece of text is a domain registration date, and so on.
Set a calendar reminder so that your domain name doesn’t expire
How to check domain expiration dates with an API
Let me show you a part of the Whois API response for the domain name godaddy.com. This one is parsed, and the response is in JSON. What was before a block of text, it’s now beautifully parsed. You can see the text in white color, which is now declared as the creation date, date of expiry, corresponding whois server, nameservers, and other data. This is now machine-readable, which means your software can use this data.
Whois API response in JSON – among other information, you can get the domain expiration date for any domain name.
One possible usage example is creating a service that checks domain expiration dates and then sends notifications when this date is approaching. This could be useful when you are managing a large domain name portfolio, or you are looking for expired domain names. Either way, that’s outside the scope of this article.
Hopefully, now you know how to check domain expiration dates, so let me leave you with one final piece of advice.
The important thing to know about domain expiration dates
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about domain expiration dates, and I can’t end without saying that expiration dates aren’t what they say they are. Once a domain name expires (it reaches the date of expiry), you don’t lose ownership immediately. It stops working, and you need to pay for renewal.
Now, I just opened a can of worms because this shows you don’t really own your domain names. You just lease them. And you are not really sure how much time you have after the domain name expires to renew this lease.
Unfortunately, this topic is too complex and too broad to add here, so I’ll leave that for another time. Right now, when you are reading about checking domain expiration dates, you need to know the story doesn’t end there, and then, on that date, it ends on a different date. All I am saying is that you should read about domain name cycles and what happens after the domain expiration date.
