.pay

Generic top-level domain

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

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 pay

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 .pay, 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

No eligibility rule is on file for .pay, which is not the same as a promise that it is open: the list is hand-maintained and covers the restricted TLDs a registrar is likely to offer you. Check the registry's own page before counting on a name. 81 TLDs do carry a rule — see Who can register.

How `ds` answers for it

RDAP first, WHOIS second — the same order for every TLD. .pay has an RDAP service and no WHOIS entry, so every answer is authoritative RDAP.

RDAP: https://rdap.nominet.uk/payFrom IANA's bootstrap, refreshed when this page was built. The lookup is https://rdap.nominet.uk/pay/domain/mybrand.pay — a 404 means the name is free.

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

The registry

From IANA's delegation record for .pay. .pay is a generic TLD.

Run by: Amazon Registry Services, Inc.Based in United States of America. Delegated 2016-07-21, record last updated 2025-02-14.
Registry site: www.nic.payWhere the registry documents .pay — its rules, its accredited registrars, and any launch phases. Not a shop: registries sell wholesale to registrars, not to you.
Published services: rdap.nominet.ukWhat the registry itself tells IANA it runs. They agree with what ds asks.
Name servers: dns1.nic.paydns2.nic.paydns3.nic.paydns4.nic.paydnsa.nic.paydnsb.nic.paydnsc.nic.paydnsd.nic.payThe 8 authoritative servers for the .pay 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.

generic IANA Root Zone Database types it "generic"
new-gtld ICANN delegated it on or after 2013-10-23, when the 2013 round opened — see delegated

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.

Money & Finance Banking, insurance, investment, lending, and tax.

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

Delegated to: dns1.nic.pay213.248.218.742a01:618:402::74
dns2.nic.pay103.49.82.742401:fd80:402::74
dns3.nic.pay213.248.222.742a01:618:406::74
dns4.nic.pay43.230.50.742401:fd80:406::74
dnsa.nic.pay156.154.100.32001:502:ad09::3
dnsb.nic.pay156.154.101.32001:502:2eda::3
dnsc.nic.pay156.154.102.32610:a1:1009::3
dnsd.nic.pay156.154.103.32610:a1:1010::3
The 8 name servers the root hands out for .pay, 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 62576RSA/SHA-256 · SHA-256DA12C17AE6EFE2AA5782C2C0CD41BA4A845AD04E2AEA30A826418B4490FFB264
Each one is a fingerprint of .pay'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 .pay 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 pay. NS and dig +norec @a.root-servers.net pay. DS.