.cater
Is .cater a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
Nobody has applied for .cater in its own right, as of 7 October 2026. Squarespace named .cater as the backup string of its .chef application.
A niche verb for the catering trade; most caterers would treat it as a vanity add-on rather than their main web address.
catering businesses, event-food services and food-ordering platforms wanting a trade-specific address, mostly as a secondary or campaign domain
Nobody has applied for .cater in its own right.
The 2012 applications making the most similar bet. Chosen by AI from every string in that round, without being told what happened to any of them.
Same trade word for the same business, differing only in grammatical form: a service-category string whose only plausible primary registrants are catering firms putting their trade on their own storefront.
Same bet shape — a hospitality trade-category word that an independent food-service operator adopts as its primary identity — just a larger, better-funded registrant pool than caterers.
Identical bet with a different trade: a narrow local-vendor profession word in the event-services cluster, where success depends on a small base of low-digital-spend SMBs re-identifying under the category label.
What a .cater domain is
.cater is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Commerce category. Nobody has applied for .cater in its own right. It is named on ICANN’s list as part of an application for another string.
Is the .cater domain extension real yet?
.cater is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. Nobody has applied for it on the public record; the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round is the process that would decide whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .cater domain?
You can’t yet. A .cater name can only be registered once the string is delegated (added to the DNS root) and its registry opens. Last round's closest parallel to .cater was .catering, delegated on 4 February 2014.
Is .cater a real TLD?
Not yet. .cater is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because ICANN’s list names .cater as part of an application for another string. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Squarespace · first recordedICANN
“SRL2616T-T62801 · Squarespace Registry LLC · replacement string of .chef”ICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow). The catering trade is real but local, fragmented, and heavily served by .com and marketplace listings, so demand for a dedicated verb-string is shallow. By analogy (flagged as analogy), the existing noun-form .catering from the 2012 round has stayed a small, low-visibility namespace with little aftermarket, and .cater is a weaker form of the same idea: a verb that reads awkwardly as an identity ("we.cater" style hacks are the main appeal) and competes with an incumbent string for the same narrow niche. Not 30-49: there is no plausible path to volume or price-driven registrations when a near-identical noun TLD already exists and primary-identity use would need explaining to every customer. Not 1-9: caterers, meal-prep services and event platforms exist in every market and some would register it for campaigns, redirects or phrase hacks, so a thin but real market is there. Applicant facts are neutral and from the record only: Squarespace Registry LLC filed it as a replacement string for .chef (ICANN application SRL2616T-T62801), with zero contention recorded. Main market uncertainty: whether the string gets any distribution beyond retail registrar shelves, since narrow trade strings without a channel tend to stall at hobbyist and defensive registrations.