Namecheap Raises .com Prices Again on November 1, 2026

Published October 28, 2026

Update, 1 November 2026: the new prices are now in effect — .com renewals $19.98, regular registrations $15.98. The window to lock in the old $18.48 renewal rate has closed; the transfer comparison below now stands against $19.98, not $18.48.

Namecheap is raising .com prices on November 1, 2026. Renewals go from $18.48 to $19.98 a year, and regular registrations from $14.98 to $15.98. If you hold domains at Namecheap, you have days — not months — to lock in the current rate by renewing early.

This continues a year of increases at Namecheap. We documented the pattern of Namecheap’s 2026 .com price hikes already; this November move follows the same shape, and it lands on renewals — the price paid by existing, auto-renewing customers.

The new prices

According to Namecheap’s customer email, reported October 17, 2026, the .com prices change as follows on November 1:

The renewal increase is $1.50 a year per domain. On a single domain, that’s forgettable. Across a portfolio of twenty domains, it’s $30 a year, every year, for nothing new.

Why it’s happening — and what wholesale doesn’t explain

The wholesale backdrop is real. Verisign, which operates the .com registry, raises its wholesale price from $10.26 to $10.97 per domain per year on November 1, 2026, and ICANN adds $0.20. That puts the cost floor for every .com at $11.17 from November 1, up from $10.46.

But the wholesale increase is $0.71. Namecheap’s renewal increase is $1.50 — more than double the wholesale move. The wholesale rise explains part of the new price. The rest is margin, and it’s the same pattern as the earlier 2026 hikes: increases landing on renewals while intro pricing for new customers stays low, preserving the cheap-first-year image that built Namecheap’s reputation.

Every registrar faces the same wholesale increase, which makes the comparison instructive. Registrars that sell at or near cost — Cloudflare at cost, Porkbun around $11 — will also move, by roughly the $0.71 wholesale increase. Their renewals will land around $11–12. Namecheap’s will land at $19.98. Same wholesale cost, same registry, an $8-a-year gap that is purely the registrar’s spread.

What to do before November 1

You have two moves, and both beat doing nothing:

1. Renew for multiple years now. Multi-year renewals at Namecheap lock in today’s $18.48 rate for each year you buy before November 1. If you’re staying at Namecheap anyway, this is the cheapest action available — it costs nothing extra beyond prepaying renewals you’d pay later at the higher rate.
2. Transfer out. A transfer to Porkbun or Cloudflare costs around $10–11 and includes a year’s renewal at the new registrar’s rate. Transferring before November 1 means the year you buy is priced at today’s wholesale, not November’s. Step-by-step: move from Namecheap to Porkbun or move from Namecheap to Cloudflare.

One honest caveat: if you transfer to an at-cost registrar, expect its price to tick up by roughly $0.71 after November 1 too — wholesale rises hit everyone. The point isn’t that the alternatives never raise prices. It’s that their increases track wholesale, while Namecheap’s keep running ahead of it.

The pattern, not the incident

A single $1.50 increase is not a scandal. What makes it worth a news post is that it isn’t single: it follows a year of increases at a registrar that spent two decades building its brand on being the affordable alternative, now owned by a private equity firm with a $1.5 billion price tag to earn back. The full timeline runs from the 2025 buyout through the hikes to the October seizure incident.

If your renewals have been creeping up all year, this November increase is the moment to decide deliberately rather than absorb it on auto-renew: lock in the old rate, or move to a registrar whose renewal price tracks what domains actually cost.