.town Domain
Put Your Town on the Map
Register your .town domain from just £33.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .town domain?
The .town domain is the smaller sibling of .city. It's designed for market towns, small communities, and local information portals. Parish councils, local business directories, and community news sites all benefit from a domain that celebrates place without the urban connotations of .city.
Who should register .town?
Parish councils, local business directories, community news sites, and small-town tourism boards.
Why choose .town?
- Celebrates small-town identity
- Pairs naturally with town names
- Ideal for local directories
- Distinct from .city in scale
Who runs .town, and since when
Registry data from the .town delegation record held by IANA, which maintains the internet's root zone. Eligibility comes from the registry's own policy, and the prices are ours.
- Extension type
- Generic (gTLD)
- Registry operator
- Binky Moon, LLC
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2014
- Delegated 3 April 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone; no connection to any actual town is required
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £33.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Why a parish council should check .gov.uk first
Before buying a .town domain, a parish or town council in Britain should know it can have a .gov.uk instead. GOV.UK lists parish, town or community councils among the bodies eligible for one, and runs a Parish Council Domain Helper Service specifically to get small councils onto it. That address carries central government recognition, and no commercial extension can buy that. If you are a council, check it first and treat .town as the fallback.
Which leaves everybody else: local directories, community news sites, town centre partnerships, business improvement districts, tourism groups. For those, .town works, with two caveats worth hearing before you order.
The first is money. Binky Moon runs both .town and .city, and the smaller sibling currently costs more than .city does, which is not what anyone expects. Check both prices rather than assuming the town version is the economy option.
The second is collisions. Britain repeats its place names heavily, and the second-level name is where that bites. There are several Newports, more than one Ashford, and a Whitchurch in at least three counties. Whoever registers first gets the plain version and everybody else adds a county. Think that through before it goes on signage, because a single town name reads cleanly in front of the dot and a hyphenated county suffix does not.
Registration is open. Nothing checks that a town of that name exists, or that you speak for the one that does.
Is .town the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.town works well if
- You run a local directory, a what's-on listing or a town centre partnership, and the address needs to name the place.
- The town's .co.uk went to somebody else years ago and you want a clean single-word alternative.
- You are a BID or a chamber of trade covering one town, where a county-level domain would be too broad.
- You want the extension to carry the geography, so the word before the dot can be the town on its own.
Look elsewhere if
- You are a parish, town or community council. You are eligible for a .gov.uk, and that is a stronger signal than anything you can buy.
- You picked it expecting the cheaper option because it says town rather than city. It currently costs more than .city.
- You want the UK local search signal. Google reads .town as generic, not British, so a .co.uk does more for you there.
A parish or town council should apply for a .gov.uk first. For everyone else in town, the cheaper local signal is still the .co.uk. See .co.uk pricing.
.town vs .co.uk: which should you register?
The honest comparison for a British town site is not .town against .city. It is .town against the .co.uk you almost certainly looked at first.
.co.uk is a country-code extension, so Google uses it to work out that the site is aimed at Britain. That matters for a business or a directory chasing local search. .town carries no country at all: it says town to a human reader and nothing to a search engine.
Where .town earns its place is availability. The one-word town .co.uk went long ago across most of the country, and the .town version may still be sitting there unregistered.
| .town | .co.uk | |
|---|---|---|
| Geographic signal | None, treated as generic | United Kingdom |
| Annual cost | Over three times a .co.uk | Low |
| One-word availability | Often still open | Long gone in most towns |
| Transfer time | Hours to a few days | Near instant IPS tag change |
| WHOIS privacy | Paid add-on | Free under Nominet rules |
.town domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .town domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyYes, but check .gov.uk first. GOV.UK names parish, town and community councils among the organisations eligible for a .gov.uk address, and runs a helper service to move small councils onto one. A .gov.uk carries recognition and central security monitoring that a commercial extension cannot offer. Register a .town alongside it if you want a friendlier address for a tourism or events site.
No, and that surprises most people. Both are run by Binky Moon, and .town currently carries the higher annual price of the two despite describing the smaller place. There is no technical reason for it; registries price by expected demand rather than by size of settlement. Compare the two prices on the day you order rather than assuming.
No. Google treats keyword extensions like .town as generic, with no geographic weight, so it will not lift you in British results the way a .co.uk can. What helps local search is a consistent address and postcode on the page, a Google Business Profile, and links from local sites. The extension is a branding decision, not a ranking one.
Included with Your .town Domain
DNS Management
Full DNS zone editor to manage A, CNAME, MX, TXT, and all record types.
Email Forwarding
Set up professional email addresses and forward to any inbox.
Auto-Renewal
Never lose your domain with automatic renewal protection.
Free 10GB Mailbox
One 10GB mailbox (POP3/IMAP) included with every domain, on any TLD.
Other Community Domains Extensions
Register your .town domain today
Secure your .town domain from just £33.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
