.com dominates the recorded market. Of 128,867 recorded sales in our corpus, 100,357 are .com. That depth makes .com the easiest extension to find comps for, and also the easiest to misread, because the range runs from a 1,000 USD brandable to a 12,000,000 USD single word. This page explains what moves .com prices and how to use comps well.
Why .com behaves differently
.com is the default. Customers type it without thinking, email addresses at .com look established, and many businesses treat owning the .com of their brand as a requirement rather than a preference. That default status creates demand that no other extension has, and it means the same word is usually worth far more in .com than anywhere else.
It also means supply is tight at the top. Almost every common dictionary word in .com has been registered for decades. Good names come to market only when an owner decides to sell, a business closes, or a name expires and drops to auction.
Who buys .com names
Operating businesses buy the .com that matches their brand, often after launching on a longer or different name. These are the end users who pay retail.
Domain investors buy at expired auctions and investor venues, from DropCatch and NameJet to GoDaddy auctions, aiming to resell to end users. They pay wholesale.
Large companies and funds occasionally compete for top tier names. These deals make the headlines. The largest recorded sale is icon.com at 12,000,000 USD (Hilco Digital Assets, 2025-04-24). Widely reported earlier sales, such as Voice.com at 30 million USD in 2019, sit before our corpus.
What drives .com prices
Single words and short names
One-word .com names are the premium tier. Recent recorded examples include nas.com at 1,250,000 USD (Lumis, 2026-04-16) and twig.com at 695,000 USD (ApexMoon.com, 2026-05-11). The value comes from scarcity and from how many businesses could use the word.
Short letter and number combinations
Three and four character .com names form their own liquid market, priced largely by pattern rather than meaning. Letters that could stand for many companies, and numbers considered lucky in Chinese markets, tend to sell higher. For example, 7555.com sold for 128,888 USD (GoDaddy, 2026-04-16) and aae.com for 52,500 USD (DropCatch, 2026-05-11). These are investor driven markets, so venue and pattern matter more than any dictionary meaning.
Brandables and two-word names
Most recorded .com sales are invented brandables and two-word phrases. These trade in a lower band, and the spread between a good one and an average one is wide. Pronunciation, spelling, how many businesses could use it and whether it sounds like a company name all count.
Singular versus plural
Singular is usually stronger, but not always. rebate.com and rebates.com each sold for 500,000 USD (Sedo, 2022-12-01), and bagels.com sold for 500,000 USD (Sedo, 2024-03-18). When the plural is how a business naturally describes itself, the discount can vanish.
Wholesale and retail in .com
Because .com has the deepest investor market, the wholesale and retail layers are both large. Repeat sales show the gap clearly. agon.com sold for 22,100 USD (NameJet, 2023-05-19) and later for 249,000 USD (Atom.com, 2026-03-30). reguard.com went from 1,313 USD (NameJet, 2023-06-08) to 35,000 USD (Afternic, 2024-05-14).
These are cases where an investor found a buyer. Many auction purchases never resell. Retail prices include the cost of holding names and the time it takes to find the right buyer, which is why the average retail sale across the corpus (6,437 USD) sits well above the average wholesale sale (3,312 USD).
GoDaddy deserves a note. It carries a very large share of .com trading and mixes expired auctions with sales to end users, so we label it a mixed venue. A GoDaddy price is evidence, but it needs more context than a clearly wholesale or clearly retail sale.
How to use comps for a .com name
- Use the depth. In .com you can usually be strict. Insist on comps that match length and style, not only extension.
- Separate the sub-markets. Dictionary words, short letter combinations, numeric names and brandables behave like different markets. Do not mix them.
- Pick a venue tier. Decide whether you are estimating an auction bid or a buy now price, and weight comps from that tier.
- Ignore the trophies. Seven figure sales are comps only for a handful of names. The median recorded sale across the corpus is 1,900 USD.
- Read meaning, not letters. For brandables and two-word names, find sales that would appeal to the same type of business. Our guide to domain comps covers how to weigh them.
How SoldComparables handles .com names
SoldComparables searches all 100,357 recorded .com sales. Comps are scored from 0 to 100 on extension, length, style, term class, singular or plural, digits, hyphens, venue tier and meaning. Meaning comes from an embedding language model that has precomputed which words are close, so a .com brandable for scheduling software can find comps built on task, planner or calendar words, not only exact matches.
Each comp shows up to three plain reasons, its venue tier, date and a link to the public report it came from. The estimate gives low, likely and high values, separate wholesale and retail figures, a confidence level and a rationale that cites comps by name, price and date. It is a data-backed estimate, not a certified appraisal.
To compare with other extensions, see .net domain sales and .ai domain sales, or browse sold domain names across the whole market.
Check your .com name on the domain appraisal tool, or see the plans on the pricing page.