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.us domain: registry, rules and WHOIS

US businesses, individuals and local government

Facts

Type
Country-code top-level domain (ccTLD)
Registry operator
GoDaddy Registry, under contract with the US Department of Commerce (NTIA)
Country or territory
United States
Added to the root zone
1985
RDAP
Not listed in the IANA bootstrap file
WHOIS server
whois.nic.us
Registration
Eligibility requirements apply
Typical use
US businesses, individuals and local government

RDAP availability is taken from the IANA RDAP bootstrap file published on 2026-09-16; WHOIS server and delegation year from the IANA root zone database. Registry policies change: check the registry's own policy before relying on an eligibility rule.

What is .us?

.us is the country-code top-level domain of the United States. For many years it was used mainly through a geographic hierarchy of state and locality names; second-level registrations such as example.us were opened in 2002.

Who can register it

Registrants must meet the usTLD Nexus requirement: a US citizen or resident, a US-organised entity, or a foreign entity with a genuine presence or lawful activities in the United States. Registrars collect a nexus category at registration. The .us policy also does not allow private or proxy registration services, so registrant contact data is published.

WHOIS, RDAP and privacy

.us is not listed in the IANA RDAP bootstrap file dated 2026-09-16, so no public RDAP service is announced for it. OrbitProbe falls back to the classic port-43 WHOIS server (whois.nic.us). WHOIS output is free text in a registry-specific layout, so only a fixed set of fields is read (registrar, dates, status, nameservers) and some of them may simply not be present. For ccTLDs, what is published is decided by the registry and local law rather than by ICANN, so output differs from one extension to the next. Most registries do not show the personal data of individuals in public output. OrbitProbe only ever shows the organisation name and country.

Look up a .us domain

FAQ

Who can register a .us domain?

Registrants must meet the usTLD Nexus requirement: a US citizen or resident, a US-organised entity, or a foreign entity with a genuine presence or lawful activities in the United States. Registrars collect a nexus category at registration. The .us policy also does not allow private or proxy registration services, so registrant contact data is published.

How do I run a WHOIS lookup for a .us domain?

Type the name, in the form example.us, into the form on this page. Because no RDAP service is published for .us, OrbitProbe queries the WHOIS server whois.nic.us. The result shows where the data came from and when it was observed.

Does .us support RDAP?

The IANA RDAP bootstrap file dated 2026-09-16 does not list an RDAP service for .us. Registration data is queried through the classic WHOIS server whois.nic.us. Registries can add RDAP later, so this may change over time.