.pro Domain
Earn the Professional Edge Online
Register your .pro domain from just £30.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .pro domain?
The .pro domain is a mark of professionalism across any industry. It serves as a credible, concise address for freelancers, consultants, and certified professionals. Its brevity makes it one of the most versatile extensions available.
Who should register .pro?
Freelancers, certified professionals, consultants, and skilled tradespeople.
Why choose .pro?
- Short and highly memorable
- Signals verified professionalism
- Works across all industries
- Clean personal branding
Who runs .pro, and since when
Registry data from the .pro 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
- Restricted generic
- Registry operator
- Identity Digital Limited
- The organisation that runs the extension
- In the root zone since
- 2002
- Delegated 8 May 2002
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide since 2015, with no professional credentials required
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £30.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
Why .pro no longer checks your professional credentials
Look up .pro in the IANA root zone database and it is still filed as a restricted generic top-level domain. That classification is a fossil. It describes the extension as it was designed in 2002, not as it has worked since 16 November 2015, when the registry stopped checking credentials and opened .pro to anyone who wants one.
The original idea was tighter than almost anything else in the root zone. RegistryPro signed its contract with ICANN in May 2002, the extension was delegated on 8 May that year, and public registration opened on 23 June 2004 for four professions only: accountants, engineers, lawyers and medical professionals, and only in Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. You had to be licensed, and you had to prove it. Take-up was poor enough that the extension was relaunched in September 2008 with a wider definition, government-certified professionals in any country, still with licence details attached to the registration. Afilias bought RegistryPro in January 2012, and Identity Digital runs the registry today.
What the 2015 change means for a buyer
A new ICANN registry agreement in late 2015 let the operator drop the restriction outright, and it did. Nobody checks who you are now, and that cuts both ways. If you are a chartered surveyor hoping the extension will vouch for you, it will not, in much the same way that .com does not vouch for a shop. Anyone can hold a .pro, so holding one proves nothing about qualifications.
What it still does is read as a working address for a person rather than a company. Firstname-surname combinations survive on .pro long after they have gone on .co.uk, and that availability is the real reason customers ask us about it. The registry also ran profession-specific third levels in its earlier years, names sitting under law.pro, cpa.pro, med.pro and eng.pro, which is why you will occasionally see a .pro address with an extra label in the middle. What we register for you is a name directly under .pro.
Our steer: buy it for the name, never for the implied credential. At roughly three times the annual cost of a .co.uk and with no UK search signal behind it, a .pro works as a personal or international professional address. It rarely works as the main address of a UK business selling to people down the road.
despite demand from registrants and registrars alike, .PRO names have historically been denied to professionals from a wide range of fields such as policemen, firefighters, journalists, programmers, artists, writers, and many others.
What that means if you are buying one
That is the registry explaining why it gave up. A rule admitting lawyers and doctors but not programmers or journalists was never going to match how people describe their own work. There is a warning in it too: what an extension means is set by whoever holds the contract, and contracts get renegotiated.
Is .pro the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.pro works well if
- Your own name has gone on .com and .co.uk, and yourname.pro is free. For a consultant trading under their own name that is the whole argument.
- You work across borders and do not want a national extension telling people which country to expect you to be in.
- You want a second, personal address alongside a company .co.uk, for a profile page, a CV or a portfolio that is yours rather than the firm's.
- The word "pro" is doing real work in the name itself, for example a trade tool or the paid tier of something you make.
Look elsewhere if
- You are buying it because it signals verified credentials. That stopped being true on 16 November 2015, and anyone who knows the extension knows it.
- Your customers are local and search from the UK. A .co.uk carries a geographic signal in Google that .pro does not, and it costs about a third as much.
- Price matters over a long horizon. A .pro is roughly three times a .co.uk every year, and a domain is a bill you pay for as long as the business exists.
- Half your traffic comes from someone reading the address out. People default to .com after a name, and "dot pro" invites a follow-up question you have to answer every time.
Trading mainly with UK customers under a company name? The .co.uk does more for local search and costs a fraction of the price. See .co.uk pricing.
.pro vs .co.uk: which should you register?
These two are aimed at different things, which makes the comparison useful rather than close. A .co.uk says where you are. A .pro says something about the individual, or at least it used to, and now says rather less.
Pick .co.uk when your customers are British and find you through search, when you want free WHOIS privacy as a UK individual under Nominet's rules, and when you would rather the cheaper renewal. Pick .pro when the name matters more than the location: a personal professional address, an international practice, or a name that has simply gone everywhere else.
Plenty of people hold both, and that is usually the sensible answer for a UK consultant. The .co.uk carries the business and the search visibility, the .pro carries the personal profile, and one redirects to the other. Two renewals a year is a small price for not having to choose.
| .pro | .co.uk | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Generic, open to anyone since 2015 | Country-code for the United Kingdom |
| In the root zone since | 2002 | 1985, as part of .uk |
| UK search signal | None | Yes, Google reads it as UK |
| WHOIS privacy | Paid add-on | Free for UK individuals |
| Transfer time | Usually a few days | Near instant IPS tag change |
| Annual cost | About three times a .co.uk | The cheaper of the two |
.pro domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .pro domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. The registry dropped credential checking on 16 November 2015 and .pro has been open to anyone anywhere since then. Before that you had to name a licensing body and supply your registration details, and between 2004 and 2008 you had to be an accountant, engineer, lawyer or medical professional in one of four countries. None of that applies now. Nothing is verified, nothing is asked for, and the order goes through like any other domain.
Not in practice, although the paperwork still says so. IANA classifies .pro as a restricted generic top-level domain because that is what it was when it was delegated in 2002, and the root zone database entry has never been reworded. The registry contract that actually governs registrations was replaced in 2015 and the restriction went with it. If you see .pro described as restricted somewhere, that is a description of history rather than of what happens when you order one.
It is neutral, which is not the same as helpful. A .pro carries no country signal, so it does nothing for you in Google UK results the way a .co.uk does. The extension itself will not rank you and will not hold you back either. What moves the needle is the same as on any other domain: the content, the links pointing at it, and how quickly the pages load. Pick .pro for the name, not for search.
The registry charges more at wholesale, and that flows straight through to what you pay. Technically the two are identical: the same DNS records, the same DNSSEC support, the same everything once the domain resolves. You are paying for the extension itself and nothing else. Compare the price on this page against a .co.uk and multiply the difference by ten years before you decide, because a domain is an annual bill for as long as you trade.
Not through the standard order, which registers a name directly under .pro, so yourname.pro rather than yourname.law.pro. The registry ran profession-specific third levels in its earlier years, including law.pro, cpa.pro, med.pro and eng.pro, and those names were tied to the verification rules that have since gone. If one of those is what you actually want, raise a ticket before you order and we will check what the registry still offers rather than guess at it.
Yes. You need the authorisation code from your current registrar, the domain must be unlocked, and it must be more than 60 days old and more than 60 days past its last transfer. A .pro transfer normally completes within a few days rather than the near-instant IPS tag change a .uk gets. Your existing registration period carries across and the transfer adds a year on top, so you lose nothing by moving mid-term.
Included with Your .pro 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 Professional Domains Extensions
Register your .pro domain today
Secure your .pro domain from just £30.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
