.ca

Country-code top-level domain for Canada

RDAP + WHOISrestrictedsold by 3 registrars

Register: $14.62first year
Renew: $21.05a year
Transfer: $14.65to move it
Registrars: 3quoting it
Lookup: RDAP + WHOISanswers for it
DNSSEC: Signed1 DS record in the root
Level: Secondmybrand.ca

Check a name

One command, straight against the registry — no account, no page to load.

Name

Fills the command and the registrar links below in with your own name. The page is static — nothing is looked up here, and nothing you type leaves the browser.

ds mybrand --tld ca

Add --where for the registrars and the registry's rules, --registry for the server that answered, or --all-info for everything at once.

What it costs

Every published quote in the bundled table, cheapest registration first. The figure ds prints beside .ca is the mean of the registration column — $14.62, which undercuts 89% of the 881 priced TLDs.

Registrar	Register	Renew	Transfer
porkbun.comcheapest	$8.89	$9.18	$8.98
namecheap.com	$11.98	$14.98	$11.98
101domain.com	$22.99	$38.99	$22.99
Mean — what `ds` prints	$14.62	$21.05	$14.65

List prices in US dollars, bundled with the binary and last regenerated 2026-09-09. Promotions, ICANN fees, taxes and premium names all move the real number, and a registry may decline to sell you the name at all. See Prices.

Where to register

3 registrars in the bundled table publish a registration price for .ca, which is evidence they sell it — nobody prices what they cannot sell. Cheapest first, exactly as ds mybrand --tld ca --where prints them.

Put a name in the box above and each link becomes that registrar's search for mybrand.ca, where it publishes one. This list is what the price table knows, not the whole market — see Where to register.

Who can register

Canadian presence: the registrant must meet one of CIRA's Canadian Presence Requirements.
www.cira.ca

Availability and eligibility are different questions, and ds answers the first: a name here reported AVAILABLE means the label is free, not that this registry will sell it to you. The note is hand-maintained and was last checked on 2026-09-02; the registry page it links to, not this one, is the authority. All 81 restricted TLDs, under 27 rules, are listed on Who can register.

How `ds` answers for it

RDAP first, WHOIS second — the same order for every TLD. .ca has both, so RDAP answers and WHOIS is the fallback if it does not.

RDAP: https://rdap.ca.fury.ca/rdapFrom IANA's bootstrap, refreshed when this page was built. The lookup is https://rdap.ca.fury.ca/rdap/domain/mybrand.ca — a 404 means the name is free.
WHOIS: whois.cira.caQueried on port 43, from the bundled whois.json. The name is called free when the reply contains Not found — text matching, which is why RDAP is preferred where it exists.

ds mybrand --tld ca --registry prints whichever of these answered. If a bundled WHOIS host has gone stale, IANA is asked who serves .ca today. See Accuracy notes.

The registry

From IANA's delegation record for .ca. .ca is a country-code TLD.

Run by: Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) Autorité Canadienne pour les enregistrements Internet (ACEI)Based in Canada. Delegated 1987-05-14, record last updated 2026-08-04.
Registry site: www.cira.caWhere the registry documents .ca — its rules, its accredited registrars, and any launch phases. Not a shop: registries sell wholesale to registrars, not to you.
Published services: rdap.ca.fury.ca · whois.cira.caWhat the registry itself tells IANA it runs. They agree with what ds asks.
Name servers: any.ca-servers.cac.ca-servers.cad.ca-servers.caj.ca-servers.caThe 4 authoritative servers for the .ca zone — what the root delegates to. Nothing ds queries directly; they are what makes a registered name resolve.

What it is

Derived from the root zone and ICANN's registry list — each one is a fact with a source.

country-code IANA Root Zone Database types it "country-code"

In the root zone

The delegation itself, read out of the root zone — serial 2026090900, on 2026-09-09. The registry section above is IANA's record of what .ca was delegated to; this is what the root actually answers with when a resolver asks it where .ca lives.

Delegated to: c.ca-servers.ca185.159.196.22620:10a:8053::2
d.ca-servers.ca45.142.220.1012a0e:dbc0::101
j.ca-servers.ca198.182.167.12001:500:83::1
any.ca-servers.ca199.4.144.22001:500:a7::2
The 4 name servers the root hands out for .ca, with the glue addresses that come with them — every one of them answers over IPv6. None of this is what ds queries: these servers know which names exist, not who registered them.
DNSSEC: Signed — 1 DS record in the root
key 26384ECDSA P-256/SHA-256 · SHA-25677EA11D2BE58CBBA58BF8ECD60F4C7E72D1FEB31B5993E7C55809440CB5F78B0
Each one is a fingerprint of .ca's own signing key, published by the root and signed with the root's key — which is how a resolver that trusts only one key can prove an answer under .ca came from its registry and was not tampered with in transit. It says nothing about who owns a name or whether one is free.

Ask the root yourself — no registry involved, and the same records this section was built from: dig +norec @a.root-servers.net ca. NS and dig +norec @a.root-servers.net ca. DS.