.np domain availability check

Type a name once and it is checked against every common Nepali second-level zone at the same time. Nepal's registry publishes no WHOIS and no RDAP, so DNS can prove a name is taken but can never prove one is free — this tool labels which of the two you are looking at.

Enter the name only — lexcorp, not the full domain. A full domain is accepted too; the .np suffix is stripped before checking. Examples:

Waiting for a name.

Six lookups run per name: com.np, org.np,net.np, edu.np, gov.npand the name directly under .np.

Each name is checked twice over: once against the domain itself (NS, A, AAAA, MX, SOA) and once against the zone above it with a DS query, which the parent —com.np — answers directly. That second question still gets an answer when a domain's own nameservers are missing or broken, so a registered name cannot hide behind bad DNS.

Read the verdicts the way the evidence supports them. Records answering, or the parent zone acknowledging the name, is proof of registration. An NXDOMAIN is not proof of availability: .np applications are approved by hand, and a name can be registered, or waiting in the approval queue, with nothing published in DNS at all.

Background

How .np registration actually works

Nepal's country-code domain is administered by Mercantile Communications on Nepal's behalf, and it behaves unlike almost every other TLD a business will deal with: the name costs nothing and the gatekeeping is human rather than commercial.

Free, but manually verified

There is no registration fee and no renewal invoice for a .np domain. What you pay instead is process. Applications go through register.com.np and are reviewed by a person against supporting documents — an identity document for an individual applicant, and for a company the registration certificate and PAN/VAT paperwork, with the requested name expected to relate to the applicant or its trademark. Approval takes days, not seconds, and it can be refused.

That review queue is the single biggest reason a DNS check cannot answer the availability question. Between the moment someone submits an application and the moment anything appears in the zone, the name is effectively spoken for and completely invisible from outside.

com.np is the commercial zone

com.np is the general-purpose zone and the one virtually every Nepali business should be looking at. org.np is intended for non-profits, NGOs and associations, which are expected to evidence their registration; net.np is for network operators and ISPs rather than as a spare commercial suffix.

edu.np and gov.np are genuinely restricted: recognised educational institutions and Government of Nepal bodies only, with the request coming from the institution itself. A free-looking result in those zones is not an opportunity — eligibility, not availability, is what stops you. Names registered directly at the second level under.np do exist, but they are exceptional; do not build a plan around getting one.

No WHOIS, so one authoritative check

IANA's delegation record for .np lists no WHOIS server — therefer: field is empty — and the registry operates no RDAP service either. There is therefore no programmatic way, from a browser or from a server, to read the .np register. Any tool that claims a confident "available" for a .np name is inferring it from DNS exactly as this page does, whether or not it admits that.

DNS evidence only runs one way. Delegation proves registration; silence proves nothing. The strongest probe available is the DS query used above: DS records live in the parent zone, so com.np answers for them itself, and it will acknowledge a name it holds even when that domain has no nameservers or lame ones. It is also worth knowing that a .np domain can be live with no delegation of its own when its records sit in the parent zone, which is why A, AAAA and MX are checked too rather than NS alone.

The registry's own search atregister.com.npis the only authoritative check, and submitting the application there is the only way to discover whether a pending application, a reserved string or an eligibility rule is in the way. Treat this tool as the fast filter before that step, never as a substitute for it.

What this tool cannot tell you

  • Registration status. There is no .np WHOIS or RDAP endpoint to query, so registration is never read directly — only inferred from DNS.
  • Whether a free-looking name is really free. An NXDOMAINis consistent with an unregistered name, a registered name with no DNS configured, and an application sitting in manual review. Those three are indistinguishable from outside.
  • Registry-reserved and blocked strings. Reserved names, trademark conflicts and policy blocks resolve to nothing, so they read as available here and are refused at application.
  • Eligibility. Nothing in DNS knows whether you qualify foredu.np, gov.np, org.npor net.np.
  • Fresh changes. Answers come from Cloudflare's public resolver over DNS-over-HTTPS and are subject to caching, including negative caching — a change made minutes ago may not show yet.
  • Devanagari names. Internationalised names must be entered in punycode (xn--…); no conversion happens here.
More dns tools

Check something else

All 24 tools
DNS HealthNS · DNSSEC · CAA · IPv6WHOIS / RDAPRegistrar · Expiry · LocksPropagationMulti-resolver · TTL

Found something you’d rather not fix yourself?

Configuring DNS, TLS and email authentication properly — without breaking live traffic — is part of our cybersecurity and managed services work.

Talk to an engineer