.school Domain
Give Your School a Modern Address
Register your .school domain from just £31.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included with every domain.
What is a .school domain?
The .school domain provides a clear, recognisable web address for schools, tutoring services, and educational programmes. Parents and pupils alike will find it intuitive, and it lends instant credibility to any learning-focused organisation.
Who should register .school?
Schools, tutoring services, supplementary education providers, and after-school programmes.
Why choose .school?
- Trusted and parent-friendly
- Intuitive for the school community
- Works for any age group
- Clean alternative to longer addresses
Who runs .school, and since when
Registry data from the .school 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 13 February 2015
- Who can register
- Open to anyone worldwide, with no proof of school status required
- Checked against the registry's own policy
- Our price
- £31.99 a year
- Ex VAT. Renews at the same price
What a .school domain does for UK education providers
Most extensions in the education group are wide open and carry no obligations past the standard abuse rules. .school is not one of them. Its ICANN registry agreement includes the Category 1 public interest commitments, the set of clauses ICANN applies to sectors where consumers can be harmed. Through its registrars, the registry has to require that registrants comply with applicable laws on privacy, data collection and consumer protection, that they are told about that requirement at the point of registration, and that anyone holding sensitive personal or financial data applies reasonable security. Read the agreements for .education and .academy and those clauses are absent. If you run a setting that holds pupil records, the difference is worth knowing before you choose.
Nobody checks whether you are a school. Registration is open, Binky Moon operates the extension for Identity Digital, and the same registry runs .education, .academy, .institute and .training, so availability and pricing behave the same way across all of them.
Where .school earns its keep in the UK is rarely with local authority primaries, whose addresses tend to be decided for them. It is with the businesses around them: tutoring companies, stage and music schools, driving schools, forest schools, martial arts clubs, Saturday language schools. Those are the operations that have to explain what they are in five words on a leaflet, and the extension does some of that explaining.
Our steer: if the word school is already how customers describe you out loud, buy it. If your trading name is clear without it, a .co.uk costs a fraction as much and carries a UK signal in Google search that .school cannot.
Is .school the right choice for you?
We would rather sell you the right extension once than the wrong one twice.
.school works well if
- The word school is already how people describe you: a stage school, a driving school, a Saturday language school. The address then matches the sentence they say.
- You run several settings under one trust or franchise and want a short address per site, with each site name sitting to the left of the dot.
- Your .co.uk went years ago to a business with a similar name, and you would rather hold the exact name on a different extension than pad it out with extra words.
- You want an address that survives a change of subject, because the word describes the format of what you do rather than the topic you teach.
Look elsewhere if
- You are a state-funded school whose address is set by the local authority or the trust. A second one adds a renewal and a redirect nobody asked for.
- Your customers are all within a few miles and you compete on local search. A .co.uk costs a third as much and carries a UK signal this cannot.
- You will say the address on the phone often. People hear dot com by default, so expect to spell out the extension every single time.
Teaching in one town and competing on local search? A .co.uk will do more for you and cost far less. See .co.uk pricing.
.school vs .education: which should you register?
Same registry, close enough on price to ignore, so the choice is about the word rather than the deal. A school is a thing people attend. Education is a sector, and it reads like a word from a policy document rather than something you would put on a shopfront.
There is one real difference under the bonnet. .school carries ICANN's Category 1 public interest commitments and .education does not, so .school registrants take on explicit obligations about applicable law and data security through their registrar's agreement. It changes nothing at the point of purchase. It could matter if a complaint is ever made about the site.
Pick .school when the noun is your business. Pick .education when you sell into schools rather than being one: curriculum publishers, management information suppliers, CPD platforms, ed-tech.
| .school | .education | |
|---|---|---|
| Reads as | A place you attend | A sector you work in |
| In the root zone since | 2015 | 2013 |
| Registry | Binky Moon, for Identity Digital | Binky Moon, for Identity Digital |
| Category 1 commitments | Yes | No |
| Annual cost | Roughly three times a .co.uk | Roughly three times a .co.uk |
.school domain questions, answered
What people ask us before registering a .school domain.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Ask us directlyNo. The registry runs .school as an open extension and ICANN's own open registration commitment stops it limiting who may register based on identity. There is no accreditation test, no inspection report to supply and no link to the Department for Education. Anyone can buy one. That cuts both ways: it means a tutoring business or a martial arts club can use the word freely, and it means the address on its own proves nothing to a parent.
Usually not, if most of your enquiries come from local search. Google treats .co.uk as a country-code extension and reads it as a signal that the site is aimed at the UK, while .school is generic and carries no geography at all. The .school name may read better on a leaflet or a van, so plenty of tutors hold both and point one at the other. If you are only buying one, and your pupils live nearby, buy the .co.uk.
Roughly three times a .co.uk, every year, for as long as you hold it. That is the figure to weigh rather than the first year, because a school or a club keeps its name for a very long time and the renewal repeats. Identity Digital also reserves a list of premium names it can change over time, so a short or obvious name may be priced above the standard rate. Check the price shown on this page before you commit.
Some will, and you should plan for it. Dot com is still the default guess for anyone typing from memory or hearing an address read out. If the matching .com or .co.uk is available at a sensible price, register it and redirect it, which removes the problem for a few pounds a year. If it is not, put the full address in writing everywhere you can and avoid relying on people remembering it after a single mention on the phone.
Included with Your .school 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 Education Domains Extensions
Register your .school domain today
Secure your .school domain from just £31.99/yr. Free DNS management, email forwarding, and 10GB mailbox included.
