WHOIS Lookup Tool

What is WHOIS?

WHOIS is a public lookup protocol that has existed since the early internet, used to query who a domain name is registered to, which registrar manages it, and its key registration dates and status. Every domain registry maintains WHOIS records for the domains under its top-level domain (TLD), and anyone can query them — no account or special access is required.

What is a WHOIS lookup?

A WHOIS lookup is simply the act of querying that record for a specific domain. Enter a domain name into the search box at the top of this page, and this tool queries the domain's registry directly — via RDAP where the registry supports it, falling back to legacy WHOIS otherwise — and returns the result live, with nothing cached or stored.

What information can WHOIS/RDAP provide?

• Registrar information — which company the domain is registered through.
• Registration date — when the domain was first registered.
• Updated date — when the registration record last changed.
• Expiry date — when the current registration period ends.
• Domain status — EPP status codes describing the domain's current state (active, locked, pending transfer, and so on).
• Nameservers — which DNS servers are authoritative for the domain.

Registrant details and privacy limitations

WHOIS records historically also included registrant (owner) contact details, but this is no longer reliable. Data-protection rules such as GDPR, combined with privacy/proxy services that most registrars offer by default, mean the vast majority of domains now show a privacy service's details, redacted placeholders, or nothing at all in the registrant fields — not the actual owner's information. Treat a WHOIS lookup as a reliable source for a domain's registrar, dates, status, and nameservers, but not as a way to identify who personally owns it.

Why domain information is useful

• Before buying a domain — confirming it's genuinely available, or finding out who currently holds it.
• Due diligence — checking a domain's age and registration history before doing business with a website.
• Renewal tracking — keeping an eye on your own domains' expiry dates so none lapse unexpectedly.
• Troubleshooting — confirming nameservers point where they should after a migration or transfer.
• Security research — investigating when a suspicious domain was registered, which is often a useful signal on its own.

How to interpret results

A freshly-registered domain (days or weeks old) with a distant expiry date is completely normal for a new, legitimate website — age alone is not a red flag. Domain status codes matter more than they might appear: clientTransferProhibited is a standard protective lock most registrars apply by default, not a sign of trouble, while pendingDelete or redemptionPeriod mean a domain has lapsed and is on its way to being released. See our Domain Status Checker for a plain-English explanation of every code.

WHOIS and RDAP: what's the relationship?

RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) is the modern, structured-JSON successor to WHOIS's older free-text format. It was designed to fix WHOIS's biggest practical problems: inconsistent formatting between registries, no standard way to express redacted fields, and no built-in internationalization. Where a registry supports RDAP, this site queries it first, since a structured response is more reliable to parse correctly — falling back to legacy WHOIS only where RDAP isn't yet available. Both protocols query the same underlying registration data; RDAP is simply a more modern way of asking for it.

Frequently asked questions