Who can register a .edu domain?
Who may register
Restricted to US post-secondary institutions accredited by a nationally recognised accrediting agency.
What it costs
No price for .edu in the table we track
(Porkbun). That means we have no figure, not that the extension
cannot be bought — several restricted extensions are sold only through
accredited registrars in their own country, and some are not sold to the public
at all.
Source
Read from the registry's own policy page: https://net.educause.edu/edu-domain-eligibility. Read on 2026-07-29.
Is a .edu name free?
Availability comes from the registry itself over RDAP, with a WHOIS fallback where a registry publishes no RDAP service. A throttled or unreachable registry is reported as unconfirmed rather than available. It is the one wrong answer that costs somebody money.
You can check from a terminal or from an assistant instead:
curl https://dotsweep.com/check/yourname.edu