Buy a Domain Name From Someone: Broker Fees, Escrow Costs and What You Actually Pay
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Type a domain like sunsetcapital.com or a keyword like capital to see its estimated value, the sales that prove it, and matching names for sale.
Automated estimate for informational purposes only. Not financial or investment advice, and not a guarantee of sale price.
Everything this estimate is built on is on this card. An account is for selling: your names on the seller board, each with its own sales page.
Somebody already owns the name you want. That is the normal case, not bad luck, and it means the purchase runs on a completely different track from registering a name at a registrar. You are not paying a $12 registration fee. You are running a small acquisition, and every route to it carries its own fee, most of which are charged whether or not you end up with the domain.
Here is what each route actually costs in September 2026, in the order you would consider them.
The short version
If the name is already listed for sale, buying it costs you nothing above the price: the seller pays the marketplace commission. If it is not listed, you pay to reach the owner. A registrar offer service runs $19.95 to $39 per offer and is non-refundable whether the owner replies or not. A buyer side broker runs about $100 upfront plus roughly 20 percent of whatever they negotiate. Then escrow takes 1 to 2.6 percent of the sale price on top, with a minimum. Budget the fees at somewhere between 3 and 25 percent of the purchase price depending on which route you take, and understand that the cheap routes are cheap because they put the work on you.
What each route to the owner costs
These are the published or widely reported figures as of September 2026. Fees in this market change without announcement, so re-check before you commit, particularly the broker upfront charges, which have moved twice in recent years.
| Route | What you pay | Refundable if it fails? | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| The name is listed on a marketplace | Nothing above the asking price. The seller pays commission, reported at 10 to 25 percent depending on platform | Not applicable | Always check this first. A surprising share of names have a buy now price you never see because the parked page is ugly |
| Network Solutions Certified Offer | $39 per offer, plus a 5% transaction fee if accepted | No. Explicitly non-refundable whether accepted or rejected | Offers between $100 and $25,000, which is the stated range |
| DomainAgents | Reported at $19.95 to $29.95 per offer, around 15 percent commission on a close, $199 minimum offer | No | A mid value name where you want a mediator but not a full broker. Reportedly $10 of your fee is passed to the owner as an incentive to reply |
| GoDaddy Domain Broker Service | Reported $99.99 to $119.99 upfront, plus 20 percent of the negotiated price | No. The upfront fee is non-refundable and the engagement runs about 30 days | A name worth four figures or more where anonymity matters and you do not want to negotiate yourself |
| Contacting the owner yourself | Free, plus your time and the price of revealing who is asking | Not applicable | A name owned by a small business or an individual, where a normal human email works better than a platform notification |
| A specialist buy side broker | Negotiated per mandate. Sell side firms publish 15 percent with a $1,000 minimum, which sets the shape of the market | Varies. Usually success based with no upfront charge above five figures | Five and six figure acquisitions, where the fee is small next to the risk of bidding against yourself |
Notice the pattern in the third column. Every paid route to an owner who has not listed the name charges you for the attempt, not the result. That is not unreasonable, since the platform does the work either way, but it changes how you should sequence things: exhaust the free checks first, and only pay once you have a number you would actually honor.
Escrow is the fee most buyers get wrong
Almost every article on this topic still quotes 0.89 percent for domain escrow. That rate was retired when the tiered schedule took effect on 31 May 2024, and quoting it will leave you short at closing. The current standard schedule, verified in 2026, works out like this.
| Transaction value | Standard rate | Minimum fee | On a typical deal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to $5,000 | 2.6% | $50 | A $3,000 name costs $78 to escrow |
| $5,000 to $50,000 | 2.4% | $130 | A $20,000 name costs $480 |
| $50,000 to $200,000 | 1.9% | $1,200 | A $100,000 name costs $1,900 |
| $200,000 to $500,000 | 1.5% | $3,800 | Fees stop mattering relative to the price here |
Two details worth knowing before you fund. Concierge service, where a human runs the transaction rather than the standard automated flow, is priced at exactly double the standard rate. And paying by card or PayPal on a transaction under $5,000 adds a 3.05 percent payment processing surcharge, which on a small deal can exceed the escrow fee itself. Wire the money instead. Who pays the escrow fee is negotiable and is usually split or absorbed by the seller on a listed name, so put it in writing rather than assuming.
Finding out who owns it, now that WHOIS is gone
The lookup people describe in older guides no longer exists. ICANN made RDAP the definitive source for gTLD registration data on 28 January 2025, and dropped the requirement for gTLD registries and registrars to run WHOIS on port 43 the same day. Verisign agreed to keep WHOIS answering for .com alongside RDAP, so .com lookups still work. RDAP works, but nearly every record is redacted for privacy, so the registrant name and email you are hoping to find will usually not be there.
What still works, in order of how often it works:
- Type the domain into a browser. A parked page from a marketplace almost always carries a make offer form, and that is the fastest legitimate channel to the owner.
- Search the domain on the major marketplaces directly. Names are frequently listed in one place and invisible everywhere else.
- Look at whether a live business sits on the name. If it does, you are contacting a company, not a domain investor, and the whole approach changes.
- Check the archived history of the site for a contact address that predates privacy redaction.
- Use the registrar's own contact relay, or an offer service that has one.
When it comes to the email itself, keep in mind you are writing to a stranger who receives a lot of these and ignores most of them. Short, specific, with a real number in it, sent from a real name at a real company. If you are working through a list of candidate names, resist the urge to template it: one generic message blasted at forty owners performs worse than five that each name the specific domain and a specific offer.
What to actually offer
The single most common mistake is anchoring on an appraisal tool's number and treating it as the price. Automated valuations estimate what a name might fetch at retail. They do not know that this particular owner has held the name since 2001, has no carrying cost pressure, and has turned down three offers already.
The more useful frame is that the same domain has several correct prices depending on who is buying. An investor buying to resell typically pays 40 to 60 percent of retail, because they carry the renewals and pay commission on the eventual resale. A liquidity buyer who closes in a day pays 20 to 30 percent. An end user business pays the full retail number, because for them the alternative is not a cheaper domain, it is continuing to operate under a name that does not fit. If you are a business buying a name for your own use, you are in the last group, and the owner will price you there once they work out who you are. That is precisely why buyers use brokers on larger deals.
Open below what you will pay but above insult level. On a name you would go to $15,000 for, opening at $3,000 to $5,000 is normal and expected; opening at $250 gets you ignored and burns the channel. Our page on domain buyers sets out the tiers in full, and the domain appraisal tool gives you a comps backed range to argue from rather than a number you invented.
Closing it without losing the money
Once you have a price, the sequence matters more than the paperwork. Never send funds directly to a stranger against a promise to transfer. The order that protects both sides is: agree the price and who pays fees in writing, open escrow, fund it, the seller pushes or transfers the domain, you confirm control, escrow releases. A written assignment agreement is worth having on anything above a few thousand dollars, and getting it signed by both parties electronically takes minutes rather than the days a scan-and-return round trip costs.
On the transfer itself, three rules decide your timeline. If you and the seller are at the same registrar, an account to account push is instant and free, and it is always the better option. Across registrars, the losing registrar has five calendar days to respond and failure to respond counts as approval, so five to seven days is typical. And a 60 day inter-registrar lock attaches after a new registration, after a completed transfer, and after a change of registrant, which means a name that just moved cannot move again immediately. Plan the launch of anything that depends on the domain around that, not against it.
Frequently asked questions
Can I buy a domain name from someone who is not selling it?
Often, yes. A large share of aftermarket sales start with an unsolicited approach to an owner who had never listed the name. What you cannot do is force it. There is no mechanism to compel a sale, and pursuing a name through a trademark complaint only works when the registration was made in bad faith against a mark you already held.
How much does it cost to buy a domain from someone?
The domain price plus fees. Fees are nothing if the name is listed, $19.95 to $39 for an offer service, or roughly $100 upfront plus 20 percent for a broker, then 1 to 2.6 percent for escrow. Domain prices themselves span four orders of magnitude, though the average reported aftermarket sale works out at roughly $1,280 across 2024 and 2025.
Is it safe to buy a domain from a private individual?
It is, provided the money goes through a licensed escrow service and never directly to the seller. Escrow.com has operated since 1999 and is licensed by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. The remaining risks are a name with a trademark problem or an inherited search penalty, both of which you check before funding rather than after.
Should I use a broker or contact the owner myself?
Contact them yourself on anything under roughly $5,000, where a broker's fee eats the entire economics. Use a broker above that, and especially when your own company name would tell the owner exactly how much you can afford. The fee buys anonymity and a negotiator who has no emotional attachment to the outcome, which on a five figure name usually pays for itself.
How long does buying a domain from someone take?
The negotiation is the slow part and typically runs one to four weeks, because owners answer at their own pace. Once terms are agreed, escrow plus a same registrar push can complete inside 24 hours, and a cross registrar transfer typically adds five to seven days.
What if the owner never replies?
Assume silence is the most likely outcome and plan for it. Send one follow up after ten days, then stop. Meanwhile price the alternatives properly: a different word, a two word version, or the same word in another extension, each of which you can value before deciding the original was worth chasing. Chasing one unreachable owner for six months is the most expensive mistake in this whole process and it never appears in anyone's fee table.
The full process, from tracking down an owner to the wording of the first message, is set out on buying a domain name that is taken. If the name you want is already for sale, start with the listings on premium domains. If it is a single word you have your heart set on, one word domain names covers what that category actually costs and why so little of it is available. And when you are ready to move money, domain escrow walks through the sequence step by step.