Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Sold: Record Prices and Verified Sales
Records make headlines. Comps make prices. Check any name against real sold data before you decide what it is worth, free and without an account.
Every estimate shows its work: the comparable sales and the signal breakdown it was built from, then the names like it you can buy right now.
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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.
The short answer
The most expensive domain name ever sold is AI.com, at $70 million. The deal closed in 2025 and became public on 6 February 2026 when Crypto.com co-founder Kris Marszalek confirmed he was the buyer, two days before launching the site with a Super Bowl advertisement. It more than doubled the previous public record, the $30 million paid for Voice.com in 2019. Below that sit 360.com at $17 million, Chat.com at $15.5 million and Rocket.com at $14 million. Every figure on this page is limited to sales of the name on its own for cash. That single filter is what separates this list from most of the ones published, because the numbers people quote most often, Cars.com at $872 million and Business.com at $345 million, were purchases of operating companies rather than of web addresses.
Prices are the publicly reported figures from DNJournal, Domain Name Wire and the curated cash only record. Private sales and deals under a non disclosure agreement are absent from every public list, including this one
The record
The 25 most expensive domain names ever sold for cash
Pure domain sales only. Where a transaction included a website, a business, staff, revenue or equity, it is not here. It is in the second table further down, with an explanation of what was actually bought.
| # | Domain | Reported price | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI.com | $70,000,000 | 2025 | Announced 6 Feb 2026. Bought by Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek, reportedly paid in cryptocurrency |
| 2 | Voice.com | $30,000,000 | 2019 | Block.one bought it from MicroStrategy. Held the record for about six years |
| 3 | 360.com | $17,000,000 | 2015 | Chinese security firm Qihoo. Short numeric strings carry a premium in Asian markets |
| 4 | Chat.com | $15,500,000 | 2023 | Bought for cash by HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah. See the note below on the later OpenAI transfer |
| 5 | NFTs.com | $15,000,000 | 2022 | Buyer and seller undisclosed. Sold at the peak of the NFT cycle |
| 6 | Rocket.com | $14,000,000 | 2024 | Acquired by Rocket Companies, the mortgage group, for a corporate rebrand |
| 7 | Sex.com | $13,000,000 | 2010 | Has changed hands several times for large sums and was the subject of a landmark theft case |
| 8 | Icon.com | $12,000,000 | 2025 | One of the largest sales of the current cycle |
| 9 | Tesla.com | $11,000,000 | 2014 | Tesla Motors had used teslamotors.com for a decade before buying the exact match |
| 10 | Hotels.com | $11,000,000 | 2001 | Remarkable for its date. An eight figure domain sale in 2001 was extraordinary |
| 11 | Connect.com | $10,000,000 | 2022 | A generic verb with use across dozens of industries |
| 12 | Porno.com | $8,888,888 | 2015 | The price is a deliberate string of eights, considered auspicious in Chinese buying culture |
| 13 | Gold.com | $8,500,000 | 2024 | A commodity noun with a permanent market behind it |
| 14 | FB.com | $8,500,000 | 2010 | Bought by Facebook from the American Farm Bureau Federation |
| 15 | HealthInsurance.com | $8,130,000 | 2019 | The longest name in the top 25, and proof that a high value US vertical outweighs length |
| 16 | We.com | $8,000,000 | 2015 | A two letter .com, of which only 676 can ever exist |
| 17 | Diamond.com | $7,500,000 | 2006 | High ticket retail, where one sale can pay for a lot of domain |
| 18 | Beer.com | $7,000,000 | 2004 | A category noun bought long before the current aftermarket existed |
| 19 | Z.com | $6,800,000 | 2014 | Bought by GMO Internet. A single letter .com, of which there are 23 in existence |
| 20 | Slots.com | $5,500,000 | 2010 | Gambling verticals appear repeatedly at the top of the market |
| 21 | Casino.com | $5,500,000 | 2003 | One of the earliest seven figure domain sales on record |
| 22 | Toys.com | $5,100,000 | 2009 | Sold out of the Toys R Us bankruptcy estate process |
| 23 | AsSeenOnTv.com | $5,100,000 | 2000 | A dot com boom price that took the market two decades to beat |
| 24 | Korea.com | $5,000,000 | 2000 | A country name, a category that rarely comes to market at all |
| 25 | Clothes.com | $4,900,000 | 2008 | A plural retail noun, bought before mobile commerce existed |
Prices as publicly reported. Twenty three of these 25 names are .com. None is longer than two words
The current record
AI.com sold for $70 million, and most published lists have not caught up
For six years the answer to this question was Voice.com at $30 million. It is still the answer given by a large share of the articles ranking for it, which is worth knowing if you are checking a number you found somewhere else. The record changed on 6 February 2026, when Kris Marszalek, co-founder and chief executive of Crypto.com, confirmed publicly that he had bought AI.com for $70 million. The transaction itself had closed in 2025 and stayed quiet until the launch.
Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain brokered the sale on behalf of the seller, with John Mauriello of DomainAssets.com acting for the buyer. Domain Name Wire reports the purchase was settled in cryptocurrency. Two days after the announcement the site launched during the Super Bowl as an agentic AI platform aimed at people with no technical background.
The seller's side of the story is the part domain investors tend to fix on. The name was registered in the early 1990s by an individual who chose it because the letters were his initials, at a time when a registration cost a nominal fee and nobody had heard of artificial intelligence as a consumer product. Holding a two letter .com for three decades is not a strategy anyone can copy on purpose. It does illustrate the one thing the top of this market runs on, which is scarcity that cannot be manufactured. There are 676 possible two letter .com names and there will never be a 677th.
One caution about the AI.com figure, since we would rather flag it than have you find out later. It is a reported price rather than an audited one, confirmed by the buyer and by both brokers and carried by DNJournal and Domain Name Wire, which are the two outlets the industry treats as the record of account. That is about as well corroborated as a private domain transaction ever gets, and it is still not a filing. Treat every number on this page the same way.
Where other lists go wrong
The huge numbers that were not domain sales at all
If you have read that a domain once sold for $872 million, this is the table that explains it. In each case a company was bought and the domain came along with it. Mixing these into a domain price list makes the whole list useless for valuing anything.
| Figure you will see quoted | What was actually bought | What the name alone is worth knowing for |
|---|---|---|
| Cars.com, $872 million, 2014 | Gannett acquiring the remaining equity in the Cars.com business from its newspaper partners. A profitable operating company with traffic, staff, contracts and revenue | The most repeated error in the category. Nobody has ever paid $872 million for a web address |
| Business.com, $345 million, 2007 | R.H. Donnelley acquiring the Business.com company, a directory and advertising operation | The domain on its own did sell, in 1999, for $7.5 million. That is the comparable figure |
| CarInsurance.com, $49.7 million, 2010 | QuinStreet acquiring the business and the lead generation operation running on it | Frequently listed as the highest domain sale ever. It is a business acquisition |
| Insurance.com, $35.6 million, 2010 | A QuinStreet acquisition made at close to the same time, again of a going concern rather than a bare name | Often paired with the entry above and double counted as two record domain sales |
| Chat.com to OpenAI, November 2024 | Reported to have included OpenAI shares rather than being settled in cash | The clean comparable is the earlier sale: $15.5 million, cash, in 2023 |
This distinction is not pedantry. If you are trying to work out what a name is worth, an equity deal tells you nothing, because you cannot separate what the buyer paid for the address from what they paid for the customers, the revenue and the team. A cash sale of a name with nothing attached is the only kind of data point that transfers to your situation.
The same problem shows up one level down, in the four and five figure range where most people are actually buying. A listing price is not a sale price, an asking price on a marketplace is not evidence of anything, and a name that has been listed at $25,000 for six years is telling you what the seller hopes rather than what the market pays. Working from domain sales history rather than from asking prices is the single biggest correction most first time buyers need to make.
What the record sales have in common
Four things every eight figure domain shares
1
It is a .com
Twenty three of the top 25 are .com. Not one new extension has produced a sale anywhere near this range. The premium is for the extension buyers type by reflex.
2
It names a category, not a company
Hotels, chat, gold, beer, toys, insurance. The buyer is not buying an address, they are buying the word an entire market already uses.
3
There is exactly one of it
676 two letter .com names exist. 23 single letters. 17,576 three letter combinations, none of them unregistered. Supply is fixed and always has been.
4
A funded buyer needed it now
AI.com sold into the AI boom. NFTs.com sold at the top of its cycle. Record prices happen when a well capitalized buyer is rebranding on a deadline.
The fourth point is the one that decides whether the top of this market is repeatable, and it cuts both ways. A category name is only worth eight figures on the day somebody with eight figures decides they need it. Voice.com sat with MicroStrategy for years before Block.one turned up. The individual who owned AI.com held it for roughly three decades before an AI platform with Super Bowl money existed to buy it. Scarcity sets the ceiling, but a specific funded buyer sets the price, and there is no way to schedule one.
That is also why the timing pattern is worth reading carefully if you invest. The names that sold into a boom, NFTs.com in 2022 and AI.com in 2025, both cashed out at the moment their category was at maximum attention. Names attached to a category that has cooled do not hold those prices, and a portfolio built on one theme is a bet on the theme rather than on domains. The mechanics of that trade are covered in domain flipping, and the holding costs in domain portfolio management.
The useful part
What record sales tell you about pricing an ordinary domain
Very little directly, and that is the point worth internalizing before you price anything.
Record sales are the extreme tail of a very long distribution. Reading them as a guide to what your name is worth is like pricing a house from the most expensive sale in Manhattan. The gap between the headline and the working market is easy to see in the fortnightly public data. In the two weeks to 23 August 2026, the largest publicly reported sale on the DNJournal chart was Stan.com at $750,000, and the tenth largest was Trade.io at $75,000. That is the top of the reported market in a normal fortnight, and it is already two orders of magnitude below AI.com.
Below that chart, which only ever shows the largest sales anybody chose to report, sits the market almost everyone actually transacts in: three and four figures, occasionally five. There is also a structural reason published data reads high. Reporting is voluntary, small sales are not newsworthy, and a great many transactions are covered by non disclosure agreements. The visible record is biased toward big numbers, so anchoring on it inflates expectations in a predictable direction.
The practical method is unglamorous and it works. Find names genuinely comparable to yours, same length, same extension, same kind of word, same industry, that have actually sold, and price into that band. Then discount for the thing every seller forgets: your name has no funded buyer standing in front of it today. A price is only real when somebody pays it.
Start with
Comparable sold names
Not asking prices, not appraisals, not what a similar name is listed at. Sold data only. Run the name through the domain worth calculator for a starting range.
Adjust for
Extension and length
A .com carries a large premium over every alternative. Each additional word or syllable costs real money. Hyphens and numbers cost more still.
Then discount for
Liquidity
A name worth $20,000 to the right buyer may take years to meet them. A quick sale conventionally trades well below the appraised figure.
Questions people actually ask
Most expensive domain name questions
What is the most expensive domain name ever sold?
AI.com, at $70 million. The deal closed in 2025 and was made public on 6 February 2026, when Crypto.com co-founder and chief executive Kris Marszalek confirmed he was the buyer. Domain Name Wire reports the price was settled in cryptocurrency. It is more than double the previous public record, the $30 million paid for Voice.com in 2019.
Who bought AI.com and what did they pay?
Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, at $70 million. Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain brokered the sale for the seller and John Mauriello of DomainAssets.com represented the buyer. The seller was an individual who had registered the name in the early 1990s because the letters matched his initials. The platform launched with a Super Bowl advertisement on 8 February 2026.
Is Cars.com the most expensive domain ever sold?
No, and this is the most common error on published lists. The $872 million figure from 2014 was Gannett buying out the remaining equity in the Cars.com business, an operating company with traffic, staff and revenue. Nobody has paid $872 million for a web address. The same mistake appears with Business.com at $345 million, which was also a company acquisition.
How much did Voice.com sell for?
Voice.com sold for $30 million in 2019, bought by blockchain company Block.one from MicroStrategy. It held the public record for a pure cash domain sale for roughly six years, until the AI.com sale was made public in February 2026. It remains the second largest confirmed cash sale of a domain name on record.
Has a domain name ever sold for more than $100 million?
Not as a confirmed cash sale for the name alone. The highest publicly reported pure domain sale is AI.com at $70 million. Larger numbers, such as Cars.com at $872 million, were acquisitions of operating businesses that happened to own a strong domain. That is a different transaction with a different asset attached, and it is not a domain price.
Why are some domain names so expensive?
Because the buyer is paying to own a category rather than an address. A one word .com that names an entire market removes the need to explain what a company does, and there is exactly one of each. Record prices cluster where a well funded buyer has decided the name is the brand: hotels, insurance, chat, gold, and most recently AI.
What is the most expensive .ai domain sold?
The largest AI related sale on record is AI.com at $70 million, but that is a .com rather than a .ai. Within the .ai extension itself, publicly reported sales run far lower, typically in five and six figures. DNJournal charted TrueScan.ai at $120,000 and School.ai at $105,000 in one fortnight of August 2026. See AI domains for sale for what the extension currently trades at.
What makes a domain name valuable?
Length, extension, and whether the word already carries commercial meaning. Short beats long, .com beats everything else, a real dictionary word beats an invented one, and a word attached to an industry that spends money beats one that is merely pleasant. Comparable sales matter more than any single rule, which is why serious appraisal starts with comps.
How much is my domain name worth?
Almost certainly far less than the names on this page, and that is normal rather than disappointing. Record sales are the extreme tail. In the fortnight to 23 August 2026 the tenth largest publicly reported sale was $75,000, and the working aftermarket runs mostly in three and four figures. Price against comparable sold names, not against records.
Where can I see what domain names actually sold for?
DNJournal publishes a public chart of the largest reported sales every fortnight and is the long standing industry record. NameBio maintains a searchable historical database. Both depend on voluntary reporting, so private deals and anything under a non disclosure agreement never appear, which means published data understates the true size of the market.
Can you still buy a valuable one word .com?
Yes, but not by registering one, because every single dictionary word .com has been taken for years. Buying means the aftermarket: a listed name, an auction, or an approach to the current owner. Prices for a clean one word .com typically start in the mid five figures and rise steeply with how commercial the word is.
Do record domain sales mean domains are a good investment?
They prove the ceiling exists, not that it is reachable. The names in the table above are a handful of transactions out of decades of trading, and survivorship bias makes the category look better than the median outcome. Renewals accrue every year whether or not a buyer appears, and most portfolios are carried by very few names.
Price a real name instead of a record
The useful next step is comps. Start with domain sales history for what names like yours have actually sold for, then the domain worth calculator for a range, and domain appraisal if you want the reasoning behind the number. If you are buying rather than valuing, premium domains and brandable domains are where the listed inventory sits, domain auctions covers competitive bidding, and buying a taken domain name explains the approach when the name you want is registered but not for sale. For a name priced in five or six figures, domain escrow sequences the money and the transfer safely, a domain broker handles the negotiation, and lease to own domain plans spread the payment when cash is the only obstacle. If you own something valuable already, selling a premium domain covers what a sale actually nets you.
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