.plc
Is .plc a real TLD? Who’s applying to run it?
.plc is not contested. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list, as of 7 October 2026. It is Identity Digital.
A corporate-suffix address for UK-style public companies; a small, conservative buyer pool that mostly registers it to protect a brand.
public limited companies in the UK, Ireland and other jurisdictions using the PLC form, plus industrial-automation firms playing on the programmable-logic-controller meaning; corporate brand managers more than founders
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.
Identical bet: a Companies House legal-form suffix sold back to the companies entitled to carry it, where the registry itself supplies the eligibility rule and the demand ceiling is the size of that incorporation class.
Same bet in another jurisdiction — a national incorporation suffix that only qualifying entities can credibly wear, so adoption depends on companies moving primary identity off their country-code or .com onto their legal form.
Same category of word doing the same job (a statutory entity designator as a namespace), but aimed at a far larger, cheaper, lower-prestige pool of small US filers rather than a few thousand listed companies, so the buyer and the price logic differ.
What a .plc domain is
.plc is not a TLD yet. It is a string on our record of the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, in our Commerce category. One application for it is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list.
Is the .plc domain extension real yet?
.plc is not yet a domain extension you can register: nothing resolves under it, and no registrar sells names in it. It is a string applicants have put forward in the ICANN 2026 new gTLD round, the process that decides whether it becomes one.
When can you buy a .plc domain?
You can’t yet. A .plc 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 .plc was .ltd, delegated on 23 September 2015.
Is .plc a real TLD?
Not yet. .plc is not in the DNS root, so nothing resolves under it. It’s here because .plc is on ICANN’s Reveal Day list of applied-for strings. Every entry on this page links to its source.
- Identity Digital · first recordedICANN
- Band chosen: 10-29 (vanity/narrow). The string is a legal-entity suffix like .ltd, .llc, .inc and .gmbh, but its natural buyer pool is far narrower than those: 'PLC' designates public limited companies in the UK, Ireland and a handful of Commonwealth-style jurisdictions, and those entities are few in number, conservative, and already carry established primary identities on .com or national ccTLDs. By analogy (flagged as analogy), the existing corporate-form TLDs reached registrations mostly on low pricing and defensive buying rather than primary-identity use, and the .plc.uk / .ltd.uk second-level spaces that have existed under the UK ccTLD saw little visible use relative to .co.uk; I assert no figures for any of these. It is not in the 30-49 band because I do not expect volume even on price: the eligible-company universe is small, and a public company is unlikely to move its primary identity to a new suffix in the next five years. It is not in the 1-9 band because there is a real, legitimate meaning, a secondary technical meaning (programmable logic controller, an industrial-automation niche that could produce some genuine primary use by vendors and integrators), and an experienced applicant on the record (Identity Digital, standard application, confirmed status), which makes general availability and registrar distribution plausible. The main market uncertainty is the registry's positioning: an open, low-priced policy would lift raw registrations and defensive brand buys but add little brand signal, whereas a verified-public-company policy would keep volume tiny but make each address a credibility marker; either way the aftermarket looks thin, and the automation-sector meaning is a wildcard I cannot size.