A Brief Overview of 60-Day Domain Locks

If you’ve registered a domain name before, you’re likely familiar with the 60-day lock that’s automatically added to domains upon creation. The lock doesn’t restrict you from managing your domain’s settings (e.g. saving name servers, DNS, etc.) but it does prevent you from transferring away to another registrar. Likewise, if you recently transferred a domain from one company to another, it’s sometimes locked for 60 days and can’t be moved again until the wait period is over. This can make buying and selling domain names difficult for domain investors, thus, Dynadot receives a lot of requests to override or completely remove these locks.  
 

There’s a lot of confusion regarding who actually manages registration and transfer locks. Over the years, customers assumed the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) mandated the locks while others believed it was the domain registrar themselves. We can confirm that Dynadot doesn’t place locks on new registrations or incoming transfers—it’s not a policy that we’ve adopted or implemented ourselves. We also don’t add a 60-day lock when there’s a change of registrant (i.e. when the registrant’s name, organization, email, etc. is updated) so long as the opt-out is selected prior to the change. Although we don’t impose these locks, central registries may enforce them under their policies. Some examples are:

Most of the registries above lock domains for 60 days after they’re registered. Users are unable to successfully transfer a domain from one registrar to another within the first two months of creation. This should be true for all domain registrars under Registry-Registrar Agreements (RRA). Here at Dynadot, we do allow domain pushes (also known as Change Ownership requests) if the domain is less than 60 days old. The domain can’t be transferred out of our network until the wait period is over, but you can still move your domain names between Dynadot accounts during this period. Domain buyers and sellers find this feature extremely beneficial, especially if their sale is time sensitive. 
 

Transfer locks, however, vary across registries. Newly transferred .com and .net domains don’t carry a 60-day lock with them. Similarly, newly transferred .digital or .live domains don’t have transfer locks. You can move your domain from registrar A to B and then B to C and not get caught in a 60-day lock each time you switch companies. Other TLDs, like .org, do have a 60-day lock on recently transferred domains. You can move your domain from registrar A to B, but would need to wait 60 days to move from B to C. Anytime the domain switches registrars, the lock will be enabled. 
 

In conclusion, Dynadot doesn’t add our own registration locks on new domain names, transfer locks on incoming transfers, or registrant locks when the registrant changes (if opted out). When our system notifies you of a denied  transfer request (for these reasons), it’s because the registry kickbacks an error stating the domain isn’t in a transferable state. Domains must be eligible for transfer to initiate and complete a transfer request. 
 

We know policies can be confusing, especially when there are multiple parties involved with different rules and regulations. We’d like to thank the Internet Commerce Association (ICA) for providing guidance to better understand ICANN rules and for always advocating for the rights and interests of domain name owners. 
 

Are your .com domain names in a transferrable state? Transfer them over to your Dynadot account for only $7.99 with coupon COMOVER21 at checkout. Offer ends 8/31/21 23:59 UTC.