.edu

Generic top-level domain

Register: —first year
Renew: —a year
Transfer: —to move it
Registrars: —quoting it
Lookup: WHOISanswers for it
DNSSEC: Signed1 DS record in the root
Level: Secondmybrand.edu

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 edu

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

No registrar in the price table bundled with ds quotes .edu, so the CLI prints no figure beside it — one of 927 such TLDs. That is a gap in the table as often as it is a TLD nobody sells. See Prices for supplying your own table with --pricing-file.

Who can register

US institutions accredited by an agency the Department of Education recognises.
www.educause.edu

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. .edu has no RDAP service, so the answer comes from WHOIS text on port 43.

WHOIS: whois.internic.netQueried on port 43, from the bundled whois.json. The name is called free when the reply contains No match for — text matching, which is why RDAP is preferred where it exists.

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

The registry

From IANA's delegation record for .edu. .edu is a sponsored TLD.

Run by: EDUCAUSEBased in United States of America. Delegated 1985-01-01, record last updated 2026-08-04.
Registry site: www.educause.eduWhere the registry documents .edu — its rules, its accredited registrars, and any launch phases. Not a shop: registries sell wholesale to registrars, not to you.
Published services: whois.educause.eduWhat the registry itself tells IANA it runs. Note: the bundled table asks whois.internic.net instead — one of them is out of date, and ds falls back to asking IANA when a bundled host goes stale.
Name servers: a.edu-servers.netb.edu-servers.netc.edu-servers.netd.edu-servers.nete.edu-servers.netf.edu-servers.netg.edu-servers.neth.edu-servers.neti.edu-servers.netj.edu-servers.netk.edu-servers.netl.edu-servers.netm.edu-servers.netThe 13 authoritative servers for the .edu 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.

sponsored IANA Root Zone Database types it "sponsored"

What it is for

Our reading, not a fact — nothing in the root zone says what a TLD means. Hand-maintained in tld-categories.json.

Education & Science Schools, universities, learning, and research.

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 .edu was delegated to; this is what the root actually answers with when a resolver asks it where .edu lives.

Delegated to: a.edu-servers.net192.5.6.302001:503:a83e::2:30
b.edu-servers.net192.33.14.302001:503:231d::2:30
c.edu-servers.net192.26.92.302001:503:83eb::30
d.edu-servers.net192.31.80.302001:500:856e::30
e.edu-servers.net192.12.94.302001:502:1ca1::30
f.edu-servers.net192.35.51.302001:503:d414::30
g.edu-servers.net192.42.93.302001:503:eea3::30
h.edu-servers.net192.54.112.302001:502:8cc::30
i.edu-servers.net192.43.172.302001:503:39c1::30
j.edu-servers.net192.48.79.302001:502:7094::30
k.edu-servers.net192.52.178.302001:503:d2d::30
l.edu-servers.net192.41.162.302001:500:d937::30
m.edu-servers.net192.55.83.302001:501:b1f9::30
The 13 name servers the root hands out for .edu, 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 35663ECDSA P-256/SHA-256 · SHA-256A2E1614291831A4746B5AC52B4B345357687271E85353082741F1CF3D06A4C1D
Each one is a fingerprint of .edu'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 .edu 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 edu. NS and dig +norec @a.root-servers.net edu. DS.