.group Domain
Unify Your Brands Under One Domain
Register your .group domain from just £24.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .group domain?
The .group domain is designed for parent companies, holding structures, and brand groups that operate multiple businesses under a single umbrella. It provides a corporate-level web address that sits above individual brand sites. Property groups, hotel groups, and investment groups all find it a natural fit for their group-level communications.
Who should register .group?
Parent companies, hotel groups, property groups, investment groups, and multi-brand holding structures.
Why choose .group?
- Sits above individual brand sites
- Clear corporate hierarchy signal
- Professional holding company identity
- Works for any multi-brand business
Who runs .group, and since when
Registry data from the .group 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
- 2015
- Delegated 30 July 2015
- Who can register
- Open to anyone, with no corporate structure, group ownership or membership test
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £24.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
What a .group domain covers beyond holding companies
A group can be a holding company sitting above six trading subsidiaries. It can also be a five-piece band, a Tuesday evening bereavement circle, a residents' association, a studio of four designers who did not want to be called an agency, or a research cluster inside a university. The registry that runs .group is contractually obliged to serve all of them equally, and that is more unusual than it sounds.
Specification 11 of the ICANN registry agreement commits Binky Moon, LLC to operate the extension in an inclusive manner, forbids it from limiting eligibility based on identity, and then goes one step further than most agreements do. It says the operator may not restrict names to registrants whose identity matches the most common usage of the term, and may not disenfranchise lawful users associated with a minority usage of it. The corporate reading of the word gets no right of first refusal. The choir and the parent company queue in the same line.
Where a .group domain earns its keep
The strongest case is structural. If you run several trading brands under one parent, you need an address that sits above them rather than competing with them, and hyphenating the word onto an existing .co.uk usually produces something long and ugly. Putting the parent at the short form instead reads as deliberate. It also matches how UK companies are named: a registered name at Companies House ending in Group lines up exactly with the domain, which is a small piece of consistency that pays off on letterheads, invoices and email addresses.
The trap is the opposite case, and it catches people. Customers read the word as scale. A one-person consultancy on a .group is writing a cheque the business cannot cash, and anybody curious enough to check can confirm it at Companies House in about thirty seconds. There is no eligibility rule stopping you, which is precisely why the judgement is yours to make and yours to get wrong.
Two practical limits apply as they do across the whole Identity Digital portfolio. Country and city names are reserved under Specification 5 and cannot be registered at the second level. And a name can report as unavailable because a trademark holder has blocked it across every extension the registry runs, rather than because somebody has registered it. Delegated on 30 July 2015, this is a mature extension with a reasonable amount still free at sensible lengths, and it costs less than half what .holdings does with us.
Is .group the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.group works well if
- You are a parent or holding company with several trading brands and want an address that sits above the brand sites rather than alongside them.
- Your registered name at Companies House already ends in Group, so the domain and the legal entity match without any fudging.
- You run a club, band, congregation, association or support network, and group is the word your own members already use.
- The hyphenated version on your existing .co.uk has become unwieldy and you want something shorter for a business card.
Look elsewhere if
- You are one person, or one company with no subsidiaries. Calling yourself a group when there is nothing to group reads as inflation, and it is checkable.
- Your customers are all British and this will be your only address. A .co.uk costs a fraction as much and carries a UK signal no generic extension can.
- Budget is tight and the domain does no marketing work for you. A .group renews at well over twice the price of a .co.uk, every year, indefinitely.
- You hand the address out by voice more often than in writing. Most people still assume .com, so expect to spell this one out twice.
One company rather than several? A .co.uk costs a fraction as much and claims nothing you cannot back up. See .co.uk pricing.
.group vs .holdings: which should you register?
Both are aimed at the same buyer: somebody who owns more than one thing and needs an address that sits above the rest. They differ in how narrow they are and in what they cost.
.holdings says one thing, firmly. It reads as financial and corporate, which suits an investment vehicle, a property portfolio or an asset-holding entity where that is exactly the message. It is also among the dearest business extensions we sell, several times the price of a .co.uk, and that gap repeats annually rather than being a launch offer.
.group is broader and cheaper. It covers the corporate parent while still working for a creative collective, a membership body or a charity federation, so it is safer if the shape of the organisation might change. If your registered name ends in Holdings, take the .holdings and the consistency with it. For everyone else running a multi-brand structure, .group does the same job for less.
| .group | .holdings | |
|---|---|---|
| What the word covers | Any collective: corporate, creative or community | Parent and asset-holding companies |
| Who may register | Anyone, with no structure test | Anyone, with no structure test |
| Annual cost | Mid-range for a business extension | Among the dearest we sell |
| Matches a name ending in | Group | Holdings |
| Best job for it | The parent address above brand sites | An investment or asset-holding vehicle |
.group domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .group domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. There is no structure test, no ownership test and no membership test, and the registry agreement bars the operator from limiting eligibility based on identity. Anyone can register one. The restraint here is reputational rather than contractual: nothing stops a sole trader buying it, and nothing stops a customer checking Companies House and finding one director and no subsidiaries. Buy it because it describes you, not because it flatters you.
Yes, and the registry agreement protects that use specifically. Its public interest commitments say the operator must not restrict names to registrants whose identity matches the most common usage of the word, and must not disenfranchise lawful users associated with a minority usage of it. The corporate meaning of group has no priority claim over the social one. For a members organisation it often reads better than .org or .co.uk, both of which suggest something the group is not.
Make it the main site only if the parent has real content of its own: an about page, group news, careers, investor or trustee information. If the parent amounts to a one-page holding statement, let each brand keep its own domain, because splitting search authority across a parent site nobody visits helps nothing. Where the parent has no content at all, a redirect to your strongest brand site is the honest answer.
Briefly, and then it backfires. The extension implies scale that a visitor can test in seconds at Companies House, and being caught inflating your size is worse than looking small. Use it where the structure is real: subsidiaries, chapters, branches, member organisations, bands within a collective. Where it is not, the address becomes a claim you keep having to defend in conversations you did not want.
No, and it does not help either. Google treats generic extensions alike, so a .group ranks on the same signals as anything else: content, links, speed and relevance. The real consideration is what it withholds. A .co.uk is a UK country-code extension and carries a geographic signal in Google UK results that no generic extension has. If most of your traffic should come from British searches, that absence matters more than the extension does.
Usually a few days. Three things have to be true before it starts: the domain unlocked, its authorisation code in your hands, and at least 60 days since it was registered or last moved. After that the standard generic-extension process runs, with an acknowledgement window built in. Only .uk extensions move near instantly, because those are handled by changing the IPS tag at Nominet, and ours is STACK.
Included with Your .group 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 Business Domains Extensions
Register your .group domain today
Secure your .group domain from just £24.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
