Who can register a .gov domain?
Who may register
Restricted to US federal, state, local and tribal government organisations.
What it costs
No price for .gov 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://get.gov/domains/eligibility/. Read on 2026-07-29.
Is a .gov 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.gov