Most expensive domain names sold, May 2021 to May 2026

The most expensive domain name sold in our records is icon.com, which sold for 12,000,000 USD through Hilco Digital Assets on 2025-04-24. Next come help.com at 3,000,000 USD (Above.com, 2023-01-10) and commerce.com at 2,200,000 USD (GetYourDomain.com, 2025-02-18). Almost every name at the top is a short, common English word in .com.

This list covers the 128,867 recorded domain sales we hold, from 2021-05-28 to 2026-05-28. Every sale comes from the public NamePros "Daily Domain Sales" reports, which republish NameBio top sales charts, and every row keeps its venue and a link to the report it came from. Below you will find the top 25, what those names share, how the top end has moved year by year, and why a list like this is a sample of the market rather than the whole of it.

The 25 largest recorded domain sales

The table lists the 25 highest prices in our records. Venue is the marketplace, broker or channel named in the public report. "Private" means the report listed the sale as a private transaction.

Several other names also sold for exactly 600,000 USD and share 25th place on price: socrates.com (LegalBrandMarketing, 2023-10-24), bet.bet (TOP.DOMAINS, 2024-02-20), pack.com (Sedo, 2025-01-11) and cloud.ai (GoDaddy, 2025-07-02). We list yachts.com because it is the earliest of the group.

What the top sales have in common

Read the table slowly and a pattern appears quickly. The names at the top of the market are not clever. They are plain, and they are short. A few traits explain most of the list.

Nearly all of them are .com

Of the top 25 recorded sales, 24 are .com. The single exception is wisdom.ai at 750,000 USD (Grit Brokerage, 2025-10-13). Widen the view to the 100 largest recorded sales and the share is still 80 .com names, 12 .ai names, 2 .org names and one each of .xyz, .online, .love, .io, .de and .bet. Across all 297 recorded sales at 100,000 USD or more, 177 are .com and 59 are .ai.

This matches the corpus as a whole, where .com accounts for 100,357 of the 128,867 recorded sales. Buyers who pay seven figures want the extension that people type by default, and they want to own the name that customers already assume they have.

They are short real words

Icon, help, commerce, fuse, call, sword, midnight, double, spend, divinity, wisdom, twig, mine, yachts. Most of the top 25 are single dictionary words. Among the 100 largest recorded sales, 54 have a second level of five letters or fewer, and only 2 contain a digit or a hyphen. A short common word is easy to say, easy to spell after hearing it once, and can carry almost any brand.

Very short letter strings are a category of their own

Two letter .com names show up at the very top: gx.com at 1,200,000 USD (Sedo, 2025-03-11) and zh.com at 1,000,000 USD (Sedo, 2025-08-01). Others sit just below the table, such as iz.com at 517,500 USD (Namecheap, 2025-03-26). These names are scarce by definition, since only 676 two letter combinations exist in .com, and they appeal to companies whose initials match and to buyers in markets where short Latin letter names are especially valued.

Commercial words matter more than poetic ones

Names like commerce.com, spend.com, bestodds.com and call.com describe something a business does or sells. The buyer often already operates in that space and can measure what direct type-in traffic and instant trust are worth. A beautiful word with no commercial meaning can still sell well, but the commercial words are over-represented at the top.

Plural and singular can both sell

Yachts.com sits in the table as a plural. Elsewhere in the records, rebate.com and rebates.com each sold for 500,000 USD (Sedo, 2022-12-01). Plurals usually trail their singular forms, but in category names where the plural is how people actually search and speak, the gap can close.

Where the biggest sales happen

The venues in the top 25 are a mix of large marketplaces, specialist brokers and private deals. Across the 297 recorded sales at 100,000 USD or more, the most frequent venues are Sedo (48 sales), GoDaddy (39), Afternic (23), private sales (23), Spaceship.com (22), Atom.com (21) and LegalBrandMarketing (21). Expired auction venues appear too: DropCatch accounts for 11 of them, including spend.com at 802,500 USD (2025-01-23) and mine.com at 680,000 USD (2025-04-28).

Specialist brokers such as Hilco Digital Assets, QEIP.com, LegalBrandMarketing and Grit Brokerage show up far more often at the very top than their share of the overall corpus would suggest. That is expected. At this price level, sellers and buyers tend to want someone managing negotiation, escrow and confidentiality, and many of these deals are negotiated rather than listed.

For the general pattern of how venue affects price at every level, see our guide to wholesale vs retail domain prices.

How the top end has moved year by year

The count of recorded sales at 100,000 USD or more by calendar year gives a rough view of activity at the top of the market.

Reported six figure sales roughly tripled between 2023 and 2025, and the first five months of 2026 already show more than the whole of 2023. Much of the growth in .ai sits here, with names such as wisdom.ai, cloud.ai (GoDaddy, 2025-07-02, 600,000 USD) and blockchain.ai (Namecheap, 2025-10-12, 405,000 USD). Read the numbers with care, though. A rise in reported sales can mean more sales, or more sellers and venues choosing to report them. Our AI domain sales article looks at the .ai part of this in detail.

Famous sales that predate these records

If you have read about record domain sales before, you may wonder why some well known names are missing. Our records begin on 2021-05-28. Anything sold before that is outside the corpus, even if it is famous.

The clearest example is Voice.com, which was widely reported to have sold for 30 million USD in 2019. That would be the largest sale in this article by a wide margin, and it is not in our data because it happened two years before our records start. Other headline sales from earlier years are also outside the window. We do not list them here because we only state figures we can tie to a public report in our records, or in the case of Voice.com, one that was very widely reported.

Why any list of top sales is only a sample

Public sales reports are valuable because they are verifiable. Each of the rows above can be traced to a public report thread with a venue and a date. But they are not a complete record of the market, for three reasons.

• Many private deals are never reported. Large acquisitions are often covered by confidentiality agreements. A company buying its exact match name may have every reason to keep the price quiet, so some of the biggest transactions in any year never appear in public reports at all.
• Reporting depends on the venue and the seller. Some marketplaces and brokers share results regularly, others rarely or never. A venue's presence in the list partly reflects its reporting habits.
• The floor is 1,000 USD. The public reports only list sales at 1,000 USD or more, so every recorded sale is at or above that level. That does not affect the top of the market, but it does mean the overall median of 1,900 USD describes reported sales, not every domain that changes hands.

So treat the top 25 as the largest sales that were reported publicly in this period, not as a definitive ranking of every domain ever sold. The same caution applies when you use reported sales to price your own name: a comp is evidence, not a ceiling.

What the top sales mean for pricing an ordinary name

It is tempting to look at icon.com and reason that any one word .com is worth a fortune. The data does not support that. Of the 128,867 recorded sales, 86.8 percent are below 5,000 USD, and the median recorded sale is 1,900 USD. The seven figure names are extreme outliers, and they share traits that most names do not have: they are among the most common words in English, they are very short, they are .com, and they had a buyer with a specific and well funded reason to own them.

When you price a name, the useful comps are the ones that share its real traits: length, extension, word type, style and venue. A two word brandable .com is better compared with other two word brandables than with call.com. A developer term in .ai is better compared with names like workflow.ai (Park.io, 2023-01-07, 35,000 USD) or kernel.ai (Dynadot, 2024-10-08, 14,599 USD) than with wisdom.ai. Our guide on how to price a domain name with comparable sales walks through that process step by step.

How SoldComparables uses these sales

SoldComparables searches the same 128,867 recorded sales for the comps closest to the name you enter. Every sold name is split into words, and an embedding language model has precomputed which words are close in meaning, so the search finds comps that share meaning and not only letters. Each comp gets a relevance score from 0 to 100 with up to three plain reasons, such as "Same .com extension" or "Same length".

The estimate shows a low, likely and high value in USD, a wholesale figure and a retail figure, a confidence level, and a rationale that cites the comps by name, price and date. If there are fewer than three good comps, it says so and widens the range. If no comparable recorded sale exists above 1,000 USD, it says that too, rather than inventing a number. It is a data-backed estimate, not a certified appraisal and not a guarantee of a sale price.

You can browse more of the records on our sold domain names page and the most recent entries on recent domain sales.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most expensive domain name ever sold?

Within our records, which run from May 2021 to May 2026, the top sale is icon.com at 12,000,000 USD (Hilco Digital Assets, 2025-04-24). Outside our records, Voice.com was widely reported to have sold for 30 million USD in 2019. Private deals that were never reported could be larger still.

Why are most expensive domains .com?

.com is the default extension that people type and remember. In our records, 24 of the top 25 sales and 177 of the 297 sales at 100,000 USD or more are .com. A buyer paying seven figures usually wants the address customers already assume the company owns.

Are the top sales useful for valuing my domain?

Only if your name shares their traits. Most recorded sales are far smaller, with a median of 1,900 USD. The best comps match your name on length, extension, word type and style, which is why a structured search beats looking at a headline list.

Does the list include private sales?

It includes private sales that were reported publicly, such as anything.com at 2,000,000 USD (2025-12-12). Many private deals are never reported at all, so no public list can be complete.

To see which recorded sales are closest to your own name, run a domain appraisal or compare plans on the pricing page.