.me.uk Domain
Your Personal UK Domain
Register your .me.uk domain from just £9.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included, plus free Nominet WHOIS privacy for UK individuals.
This domain has registration restrictions
A .me.uk registrant must be a natural person and must stay one, so a limited company, a charity, a trust or any other organisation cannot hold one. Read the full eligibility rules.
What is a .me.uk domain?
The .me.uk domain extension is designed for personal use in the United Kingdom. Managed by Nominet, it's ideal for personal blogs, portfolios, and online CVs. A .me.uk domain lets you establish your own corner of the British internet.
Who should register .me.uk?
Individuals wanting a personal website, blog, or portfolio with a UK identity.
Why choose .me.uk?
- Designed for personal UK use
- Affordable personal branding
- Nominet registry reliability
- Free Nominet WHOIS privacy for UK individuals
Who runs .me.uk, and since when
Registry data from the .me.uk 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
- Country-code (ccTLD)
- Registered under the .uk zone
- Registry operator
- Nominet UK
- The organisation that runs the extension
- .uk delegated
- 1985
- The date belongs to the .uk zone, not to .me.uk itself
- Who can register
- Natural persons only, so a company or other organisation may not be the registrant
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £9.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
The natural person rule that governs every .me.uk
The common assumption about .me.uk is that it is the relaxed corner of the Nominet family, the one with no rules because nobody important uses it. The opposite is true. Nominet's rules name exactly two open second levels, .co.uk and .org.uk, and .me.uk is not one of them. It sits with .ltd.uk and .plc.uk among the closed ones, and its condition is the strictest of the lot to satisfy over time.
Clause 10.2 says registrants must be, and remain at all times, natural persons, and must not be recorded on the register as the agent, trustee, proxy or representative of anything that is not a natural person. Read the words "remain at all times" carefully, because that is what turns a registration test into a continuing one. Clause 10.3 then adds that no registration, transfer, renewal or change may be requested that would breach it, that any such request may be rejected, and that if one slips through Nominet may reverse it at any time.
The trap that catches people who succeed
Say you register a .me.uk for a portfolio, the freelance work grows, and two years later you incorporate. The obvious housekeeping is to move the domain into the company name alongside everything else. You cannot. That is a registrant transfer to something which is not a natural person, and the charter does not allow it. Nominet also charges ten pounds plus VAT for a registrant transfer whoever it goes to, so this is one of the few cases where the thing you wanted to pay for is not on sale.
A related quirk is worth knowing. Where a .me.uk passes to a non-qualifying holder through a dispute resolution decision or a court order, the rules allow it only while no use whatever is made of the domain, and Nominet may enforce that by blocking nameservers from going on the record. A company that wins a .me.uk in a dispute wins a name it may not switch on. One exception survives: any .me.uk registered before 25 October 2004 sits outside the natural person rule until it is next transferred or cancelled.
So the steer is not really about branding, it is about the contract. A .me.uk makes a good personal address and a poor business one. If there is any chance the site becomes a company, put it on a .co.uk now and save yourself a move you will not be permitted to make.
Who is allowed to register .me.uk?
A .me.uk registrant must be a natural person and must stay one, so a limited company, a charity, a trust or any other organisation cannot hold one.
- Individuals only
- Registrants must be, and remain at all times, natural persons. A limited company, partnership, club, charity or trust cannot be the registrant, and nor can an individual who is recorded as acting as agent, trustee, proxy or representative for one.
- It applies at renewal too
- Because the rule says the registrant must remain a qualifying person at all times, it governs renewals and changes of detail as well as the original application. It is a condition you keep meeting, not a box ticked once.
- You cannot move it into a company
- No registration, transfer, renewal or change may be requested which would put the domain in the hands of a non-qualifying holder, and any such request may be rejected. If you incorporate later, the .me.uk stays with you personally or goes to another individual.
- Transfers ordered by a court or the DRS
- Where a Dispute Resolution Service decision or a court order sends a .me.uk to somebody who does not qualify, it is allowed only while no use whatever is made of the domain, and Nominet may block nameservers to enforce that. Passing it on to a qualifying person lifts the restriction.
- If a registration breaches the rule
- Nominet may reverse the action at any time, on top of any other right it holds under the contract of registration. Registering in a company name and hoping it is not noticed is not a risk with a small downside, it is a domain that can be unwound after you have printed it.
Rules taken from the Nominet .uk rules of registration. 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 .me.uk the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.me.uk works well if
- You want a personal site that is clearly yours and not a business: a CV, a portfolio, a photography page or a family address.
- Your name is long gone on .co.uk and .com, and firstname-surname.me.uk is still open at the price of a takeaway.
- You want an email address on your own name that will outlast whichever employer or provider you are with this year.
- You are a freelancer who has decided to stay a sole trader, so the natural person rule costs you nothing.
Look elsewhere if
- You might incorporate. The domain cannot follow you into the company, and no amount of paying Nominet will change that.
- You are selling to businesses. A .me.uk reads as a personal page, and a procurement contact will treat it as one.
- You want the shortest possible address. Three labels is a lot of typing for something people reach from a business card.
- You need a name using a reserved word. Nominet forbids ac, co, gov, ltd, me, mil, mod, net, nhs, nic, org, plc, police, sch, com and uk as the label here.
Any chance this becomes a business? Take the .co.uk now, because a .me.uk cannot be moved into a company later. See .co.uk pricing.
.me.uk vs .co.uk: which should you register?
People usually frame this as personal versus commercial, and that is the right instinct for the wrong reason. The signal each one sends is a matter of convention. The difference in who may hold them is a matter of contract, and only one of the two can bite you.
Pick .me.uk when the site is a person and will stay a person: your own name, your own work, your own writing, with no company sitting behind it now or later. Pick .co.uk the moment a business is even plausible. It takes anyone, individual or incorporated, it can be sold or transferred without a charter test, and it is the address a British visitor assumes by default.
If you want both, register the .co.uk as the one that can travel and point the .me.uk at it. Doing it the other way round builds your identity on the one of the two that cannot follow you.
| .me.uk | .co.uk | |
|---|---|---|
| Who may register | Natural persons only | Anyone, individual or company |
| Moving it to a company | Not permitted | Permitted |
| When eligibility bites | Registration, renewal and transfer | Never |
| How it reads | A person | A business |
| Claim on the matching .uk in 2014 | Third in line | First in line |
| Sold or transferred later | Only to another individual | To anyone |
.me.uk domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .me.uk domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. Nominet's charter for .me.uk requires the registrant to be a natural person and to remain one at all times, and it also bars an individual who is recorded as acting as agent, trustee, proxy or representative for an organisation. A company, a charity, a club and a trust are all outside it. If a company ends up holding one through a dispute decision or a court order, the rules allow that only while the domain is not used for anything at all.
Not to the company. A registrant transfer moves the domain to a new legal owner, and the .me.uk charter does not permit a non-qualifying owner, so the request can be rejected and a transfer that slips through can be reversed at any time. You can keep it in your own name and point it wherever you like, including at the company website. If the company itself needs to own the address, register a .co.uk for it and use the .me.uk as a redirect.
They are unrelated. A .me is the country-code extension for Montenegro, sold worldwide as a generic and priced accordingly. A .me.uk is a second level inside Britain's own .uk, run by Nominet in Oxford, restricted to individuals and priced like every other .uk domain. The .me.uk carries a UK geographic signal in search that a .me does not, and it costs a good deal less, so for a British personal site it is usually the better buy of the two.
Yes, and it is on before you ask. Nominet does not publish a registrant's name or postal address in the public lookup unless the registrant has given permission, so the default for a .me.uk is that neither appears. That matters more here than anywhere else on the site, because a personal domain is usually registered to a home address. There is no privacy product to buy and no annual fee attached to it, which is not true of most non-UK extensions.
Nominet blocks the labels that match an existing second level: ac, co, gov, ltd, me, mil, mod, net, nhs, nic, org, plc, police and sch, along with com and uk. So co.me.uk and org.me.uk are not available to anyone. Beyond that the label may use only a to z, the digits 0 to 9 and hyphens, cannot start or end with a hyphen, and cannot be an internationalised name, since Nominet does not offer those. Accented characters in your surname have to be dropped.
You have roughly three months of grace before it is gone for good. Nominet keeps the domain renewable for 30 days after expiry, then through a redemption period running to 90 days, during which it also appears on the public daily drop list. From 90 to 95 days it is queued for deletion and can no longer be renewed. At 95 days it drops and anyone may register it. Our renewal reminders go out well before any of that, and a .uk domain can be renewed up to ten years ahead.
Included with Your .me.uk 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 UK Domains Extensions
Register your .me.uk domain today
Secure your .me.uk domain from just £9.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
