Expired Domains Australia: How .au Drops Work (30-Day Rule, Drop List, Eligibility)

An expired Australian domain is gone in 30 days. There is no redemption period after that, no pending delete, and no registrar auction in between. The registry publishes the names due to be purged, catchers republish that list every morning, and at purge time the name is registrable by anyone who meets the auDA eligibility rules. That last part is the catch. A .com.au is only available to a commercial entity with an Australian presence, so most of the world cannot register a dropped one, which is also why the competition for a good one is thinner than for a .com.

This guide covers the .au lifecycle as auDA and the registry define it, where the drop list comes from, and what happens to the backlinks. If you want the gTLD timeline for comparison, what happens when a domain expires walks through the 45-day grace, 30-day redemption and 5-day pending delete that a .com goes through.

What happens when a .com.au domain expires?

The rules are in two clauses of auDA's .au Licensing Rules. Clause 2.14.4: "A Registrant whose Licence has expired may apply to the Registrar to renew the Licence within 30 calendar days from the Licence expiry date," provided they are still eligible, accept the terms and pay the fee. Clause 2.14.5: "If a Licence is not renewed before the expiry of the 30 calendar day period, the Domain Name will become available to the public on a First Come, First Served basis."

auDA's renewal page says the same thing in plainer words. "There is a 30 calendar day grace period after your domain name licence expires in which you can renew it." During that window "You will not be able to use or update your .au domain name," so the website and email stop working on day one. After it, "your domain name will be removed from the registry at the end of the 30 days and become available to be registered by the public on a first-come, first-served basis."

The registry side matches. Identity Digital, which runs the .au registry, lists the status codes a name passes through. redemptionPeriod means "the domain has expired but is still eligible for renewal or transfer for 30 calendar days from expiry date. The domain will be removed from the DNS". pendingDelete means the domain "will remain in this status for 24 hours, after which time the domain will be purged and dropped from the registry database."

So the timeline for an Australian domain is short and fixed.

A licence runs for one to five years, and auDA lets it be renewed up to 90 days before it expires. Nothing in the rules lets a third party reserve the name before the purge, which is why the drop itself is the event everyone watches.

Where is the .au drop list published?

The registry publishes it. Identity Digital's Domain Name Drop List page describes two reports. The Expired Domain Names list "shows domain names which have passed through the expiry process in the Domain Name Registry System and are eligible to be purged," and they "will purge at the next cycle that occurs no earlier than the date and eligible purge time (1:30pm AEST) listed in the report." The Deleted Domain Names list covers names removed early at the request of the registrar or auDA, purging "no earlier than the date and time (1:00pm AEST)" shown, and those "may be restored by the sponsoring registrar at any time up until they are purged." Times in the reports are in UTC.

Catchers republish this. drop.com.au posts a daily drop list, takes backorders against it and auctions what it catches. Because the purge is a single automated cycle at a known time, the names people want go to whoever's registrar submits the create command first, which in practice means a dropcatcher. Dropcatching explained covers how that race works, and backorder vs dropcatch vs directory covers when it is worth paying for.

The drop list is a list of names and purge times. It does not say what the site was, how old it is or who links to it. That is the work the rest of this guide is about.

Who can register an expired .com.au domain?

Anyone who meets the eligibility rules for the namespace, and the rules do not relax because the name expired.

Clause 2.4.1 of the Licensing Rules says a person applying for a licence must "have an Australian Presence; and satisfy any eligibility and allocation criteria for the Namespace being applied for". Australian presence is defined in the rules and includes Australian citizens and permanent residents, companies and organisations registered in Australia, and the holder of an Australian trade mark, though a trade mark only supports a domain that is an exact match of the mark.

For com.au and net.au there is a second test. Clause 2.4.4: "A Person applying for a Licence in the com.au and net.au Namespaces must be a Commercial Entity; and the domain name applied for must be" a match or acronym of the person's company, business, statutory or personal name, or a match of their Australian trade mark, or otherwise connected to the business. auDA's page on .au direct names puts the two namespaces side by side. ".au direct is a general use namespace. It is open to everyone who has a validated Australian presence including Australian citizens, permanent residents, companies, community organisations and more." For com.au, "you must be a commercial entity with a connection to Australia. The com.au name chosen must have a connection to your business."

In practice an ABN or ACN gets you a .au direct name. A .com.au also needs the name to relate to that business. If you plan to rebuild the site the domain used to be, the old site's subject and your business should line up, which is the same thing Google's expired domain policy asks for from the other direction. Expired domain abuse and Google's policy has the wording.

Do the backlinks survive the drop?

Yes. A backlink is a link on somebody else's page. The registry purging the name changes nothing on that page. The link still points at the domain, and whoever registers the domain next decides where it resolves.

What does change is what the linking pages get when they follow the link. During the 30-day hold the DNS is off, so the link is dead. After the purge it is dead until someone registers the name. A link that has been dead for years is more likely to have been removed or swapped for an archive copy, so a domain that dropped last month is in better shape than one that has sat unregistered since 2019.

You can see the links before you register anything. Our backlink checker reads the Common Crawl web graph, a public crawl of the web, and lists the referring domains and the pages that link. The expired domain checker shows the Wayback Machine history alongside it, so you can tell whether the links were earned by a business that operated for a decade or by a site that existed for six months.

Across the roughly 11,000 listings in the Revised directory, only a few dozen are .com.au. Small numbers next to .com, and the reason is the drop cycle: a .com.au that drops is registered again quickly by someone eligible, or it never had links worth chasing. The expired .com.au domains hub lists the ones that are available now, with the referring domain band, archive timeline and Revised Score open and the name masked until you reveal it.

How do you check an Australian domain's expiry?

Query the registry, not a WHOIS mirror. auDA runs a lookup at whois.auda.org.au that returns the status codes above, so you can see whether a name is in redemptionPeriod (the 30-day hold) or pendingDelete (purging within 24 hours). A registrar's own page will often show only "expired", which does not tell you which day of the 30 you are on.

For names that have already dropped, the recently dropped domains hub re-checks availability against the live DNS root each week and removes anything that has been registered.

FAQ

How long after expiry does a .com.au domain become available? 30 calendar days. auDA's Licensing Rules give the registrant 30 days to renew, and after that the name "will become available to the public on a First Come, First Served basis." The registry purges it in its next daily cycle.

Is there a redemption period for .au domains? The 30-day expired hold is the redemption period. There is no second window after it, unlike gTLDs, which add a 30-day redemption period and a 5-day pending delete on top of the registrar's grace period.

Can a foreigner register an expired .com.au domain? Only with an Australian presence. A .com.au needs a commercial entity connected to Australia and a name that matches or relates to that business. A .au direct name needs an Australian presence but no commercial connection. An Australian trade mark counts, but only for a domain that exactly matches the mark.

Where do I get the daily .au drop list? From the registry. Identity Digital publishes the Expired Domain Names and Deleted Domain Names reports with the purge date and time for each name. Dropcatchers such as drop.com.au republish it daily and take backorders against it.

Do expired Australian domains keep their backlinks? The links stay on the pages that made them. They resolve to nothing while the domain is unregistered, and to whatever the next registrant builds once it is. Check them with a backlink checker before you rely on them.

If a .com.au with a real history is what you need, browse the directory of expired domains with backlinks and start from the .com.au hub. Read the archive timeline and the named linking sources before you reveal a name, and confirm you meet the auDA eligibility rules before you try to register it.