Buying a domain name is a ten-minute job that people manage to get wrong for years at a time: the wrong ending, registered in the wrong name, at a registrar that charges four times the going rate, with a renewal notice going to an email nobody checks. Here is how to buy one properly in Australia, which ending to choose, what it should cost, and the handful of traps worth knowing before you type your card number in.
Buy a .com.au if you trade in Australia, from any auDA-accredited registrar, in your own name or your business's, for one to five years at $10 to $30 a year. You need an ABN, ACN or registered business name and the domain has to match or relate to that name. Buy the .au as well if it is free, so nobody else can. Register it yourself, not through your web designer, and set the renewal to auto.
Which ending to buy
.com.au is the one an Australian customer expects. It signals a local business, it is what people type from memory, and it carries a small trust advantage in Australian search results because of the eligibility rules behind it. If you only buy one, buy this.
.au, the shorter direct version, has been available since 2022. It is newer and fewer people type it by habit, but if the .au matching your .com.au is free, register it too. It costs about the same, and it stops somebody else picking it up and trading on your name.
.com is worth holding if you can get it, mostly so it cannot be used against you, and it is the right primary domain only if you sell outside Australia. Do not build an Australian trade business on a .com because the .com.au was taken; buy a slightly different .com.au instead.
Skip .net.au, .biz, .online, .site and the rest. They read as the ending you settled for.
Who is allowed to buy a .com.au
This is the part that catches people. A .com.au is not open to anyone; you need an Australian presence, which in practice means an ABN, an ACN, or a business name registered with ASIC, and the domain name has to be an exact match, an abbreviation or an acronym of that registered name, or otherwise closely connected to it. The rules are set by auDA, the body that administers .au, and the registrar checks them when you buy.
What that means in practice: register the business name first, then the domain. If you are a sole trader without a registered business name, the domain has to relate to your own name, and you can register a business name for a few tens of dollars at ASIC to open up the options. A domain registered on a thin connection can be challenged and deleted later, so it is worth getting right at the start rather than fixing after the site is live.
Where to buy it
Any auDA-accredited registrar. The domain is the same wherever you buy it; what differs is the price, the renewal price, and how easy it is to leave. Three things to check:
- The renewal price, not the first-year price. A $5 first year followed by $60 a year is the standard trick. Look at the renewal.
- That you can change the DNS yourself. Some registrars lock DNS behind their own hosting. You need to be able to point the domain wherever your site ends up.
- That you can transfer out. A .au domain can be moved between registrars without the 60-day lock that applies to a .com. If a registrar makes leaving hard, that tells you something.
A fair price for a .com.au in 2026 is $10 to $30 a year. Anything above $50 is paying for the brand on the invoice.
The steps
- Check the business name first. ASIC's register for the business name, IP Australia for trade marks, then the domain. Doing it in this order means you do not buy a domain for a name you cannot use.
- Search the domain at a registrar. Try the .com.au, the .au and the .com in that order. If the .com.au is taken, look at who holds it before you give up; an unused registration sometimes lapses.
- Register it in your own name, or the business's. Not your web designer's, not your nephew's, not an agency's. The registrant is the owner. If somebody else registers it for you, you are borrowing your own address.
- Use an email address you will still have in five years. The renewal notice goes there. A surprising number of domains lapse because the notice went to an ISP address from 2014.
- Buy two to five years and turn on auto-renew. The longer term is cheaper per year and there is nothing to remember.
- Point it at your site. Your web designer or host will give you two or three DNS records. Enter them in the registrar's DNS panel, and email records at the same time so mail works from day one.
Traps
The renewal letter that is not from your registrar. Unsolicited domain renewal invoices, sometimes by post, are an old and ongoing scam in Australia. They are designed to look like a bill for a domain you own, and paying one either transfers the domain to a dearer registrar or buys a different ending you did not want. Your renewal comes from the registrar you bought from, by email, to the address you gave them. Everything else goes in the bin.
Your name is public. The .au WHOIS record shows the registrant's name and the ABN or business name it was registered against. That is by design and you cannot hide it the way you can on a .com. If you trade under a business name, register the domain against the business name rather than your personal one and the business name is what shows.
The designer owns it. The most expensive mistake on this list. A web designer who registers the domain in their own account holds your business's address. If the relationship ends badly, so does your website. Register it yourself and give them DNS access if they need it.
Buying the hosting bundle. Registrars sell hosting, email and a website builder at the checkout. Buy the domain. Decide the rest separately, once you know what the site is going to be built on, because a domain is portable and a bundle is not.
After the domain
A domain is an address with nothing at it yet. What goes there is the next decision, and it is a bigger one than the domain was. If you are weighing up a template builder against a proper build, Wix versus WordPress versus Squarespace covers the builders and how much a website costs in Australia covers the numbers. When you get to the point of choosing a package, our website design packages connect the domain, the hosting and the email as part of the build, so the address you just bought has something behind it in three weeks.
Bought the domain and not sure what is next? Tell us the name and we will tell you what to do with it.
Written by Newcastle Web Co, web design & seo in Cameron Park NSW 2285. Last updated 6 September 2026.
