.healthcare Domain
The Professional Healthcare Domain
Register your .healthcare domain from just £70.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
This domain has registration restrictions
Anyone may register a .healthcare, including people with no clinical qualification at all, but the registry can suspend a name used to imply a status the holder does not have. Read the full eligibility rules.
What is a .healthcare domain?
The .healthcare domain is designed for medical groups, clinics, and healthcare providers who need a professional online identity. It distinguishes your organisation as a serious healthcare provider.
Who should register .healthcare?
Healthcare providers, medical groups, NHS services, and private clinics.
Why choose .healthcare?
- Clearly identifies medical providers
- Professional and authoritative
- Distinguishes from general wellness
- Reassuring for patients
Who runs .healthcare, and since when
Registry data from the .healthcare 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 24 July 2014
- Who can register
- Open to anyone, with no medical registration, licence or regulator check
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £70.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
What .healthcare proves about a UK provider
A .healthcare domain proves nothing whatsoever about the organisation behind it, and that is the most useful sentence on this page. Binky Moon, LLC, part of Identity Digital, runs the extension and asks for no medical registration, no professional body membership and no regulator reference at the point of sale. The word after the dot is a description you have chosen, not a credential anyone has verified.
The registry does carry obligations most extensions do not, because .healthcare fell into the group of strings governments flagged as touching a regulated sector. Its ICANN agreement requires registrars to bind registrants to comply with applicable law, including consumer protection law in relation to misleading and deceptive conduct, to notify them of that requirement at the time of registration, and to require registrants who collect and maintain sensitive health and financial data to implement reasonable and appropriate security measures commensurate with the offering of those services. Those words sit in the registry agreement itself rather than on a marketing page, and for a UK site they read on top of your UK GDPR duties rather than instead of them.
In England the harder constraint sits outside the domain system entirely. Section 10 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 makes it an offence to carry on a regulated activity without being registered with the Care Quality Commission. No extension changes that in either direction. A site implying a registration it does not hold is also the thing Identity Digital's acceptable use policy is aimed at, since the policy prohibits holding oneself out as having a status, credential or authorisation associated with a TLD when none exists.
Who is allowed to register .healthcare?
Anyone may register a .healthcare, including people with no clinical qualification at all, but the registry can suspend a name used to imply a status the holder does not have.
- No check at the point of sale
- Binky Moon, LLC requires no medical registration, no indemnity evidence and no regulator reference. The order goes through exactly as any other domain does, and the registry has no visibility of whether you treat patients.
- Bound to consumer protection law
- The registry agreement requires registrars to include a term obliging registrants to comply with all applicable laws, including those relating to privacy, data collection and consumer protection in relation to misleading and deceptive conduct, and to notify registrants of that requirement at the time of registration.
- A security duty on health data
- The same agreement requires a term obliging registrants who collect and maintain sensitive health and financial data to implement reasonable and appropriate security measures commensurate with the offering of those services, as defined by applicable law. For a UK site that sits alongside UK GDPR rather than replacing any of it.
- Claiming a status you lack
- Identity Digital prohibits holding oneself out as having a status, credential or authorisation associated with a TLD when it does not exist, and may deny, suspend, cancel, redirect or transfer the registration at its sole discretion. Separately, in England it is an offence under section 10 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 to carry on a regulated activity without registering with the Care Quality Commission.
Rules taken from the ICANN registry agreement for .healthcare. Registry policy can change, so check before you buy if the answer matters to you.
Not sure whether you qualify? Ask us before you order and we will check the registry rules with you. We would rather answer the question than take an order the registry will refuse.
Is .healthcare the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.healthcare works well if
- You are a group or a network rather than one practice, so no single clinic name or town name describes what you actually do.
- You sell into the health sector rather than to patients: staffing, software, compliance, training. The word names the market, which is accurate.
- You want an address that survives a rebrand of the clinical service underneath it, because the sector word stays true when the offer changes.
- You are splitting a corporate site away from a patient-facing one and need the corporate address to read as sector rather than as location.
Look elsewhere if
- You are one clinic serving one area. Patients search for the town and the treatment, and a .co.uk carries a UK signal in Google that this does not.
- Price matters. This is one of the dearer extensions in our health range and it renews at that rate every year, against under a tenner for a .co.uk.
- Patients need to hear the address and get it right first time. Ten letters after the dot is a lot to read out, and a good share of listeners will type .com anyway.
One clinic, one town, patients searching locally? A .co.uk will do more for you at a fraction of the annual cost. See .co.uk pricing.
.healthcare vs .clinic: which should you register?
The difference is what the word points at. A .clinic names the place a patient walks into. A .healthcare names the sector you operate in. One building and one treatment list is closer to how people search, so the first usually wins there. Several services under one organisation, or a business selling to the sector rather than to patients, is described better by the second.
Both are operated by Binky Moon, LLC under Identity Digital, so the acceptable use policy, the reserved name practice and the abuse process are the same on each. Neither asks for a licence, an indemnity certificate or a regulator reference. The .clinic is the cheaper of the two each year, and neither comes close to a .co.uk on price.
Where the choice is close, pick the one you can say to a patient over the phone without spelling it out. That is a better test than it sounds, and it is the one that shows up in missed appointments.
| .healthcare | .clinic | |
|---|---|---|
| What the word names | The sector | The premises |
| Registry operator | Binky Moon, LLC (Identity Digital) | Binky Moon, LLC (Identity Digital) |
| Clinical or licence check | None | None |
| Characters after the dot | Ten | Six |
| Annual cost | Higher of the two | Lower of the two |
.healthcare domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .healthcare domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. There is no clinical qualification to prove, no regulator reference to give and no professional body to belong to. Binky Moon, LLC sells .healthcare to anyone and has no way of knowing whether you treat patients. The practical consequence is that the extension is not a trust signal to a patient who understands how domains work, and Google does not read it as one either. Trust comes from the page: named clinicians, registration numbers, a real address.
No, and the two things are unconnected. Section 10 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 makes it an offence to carry on a regulated activity without being registered with the Care Quality Commission, and buying a domain does nothing towards that registration. It works the other way round too, since being CQC registered does not require any particular extension. Choose the domain on how patients find and remember you, and treat the regulatory position as a separate job.
The registry charges more for it, and that is the whole of the reason. Nothing technical differs between them: the DNS records, the DNSSEC support and the mail routing are identical. What you are paying for is the word. Because it renews at the same rate rather than at a discounted first-year price, work out what a decade costs before ordering. For a single UK clinic that difference buys a useful amount of local advertising.
Not by itself. Words inside a domain stopped being a meaningful ranking factor a long time ago, and .healthcare carries no geographic signal, so it will not help in UK results the way a .co.uk can. What moves local visibility is a Google Business Profile with accurate hours, reviews from real patients, and pages that name the town alongside the treatment. Treat the extension as a branding decision rather than a search one.
Included with Your .healthcare 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 Health & Wellness Domains Extensions
Register your .healthcare domain today
Secure your .healthcare domain from just £70.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
