How Long Is the Average Available .com? We Measured 6,369 Names

Updated 2026-07-21

The short version

Everyone knows short .coms are gone, but "gone" is doing a lot of unmeasured work in that sentence. So we measured it. DomainGenius verifies every brandable name idea it generates against the live .com registry via RDAP, which leaves us with a dataset most naming tools never build: thousands of realistic, pronounceable, brand-quality names, each with a registry verdict. This post reports what that dataset says about length, including the exact character count where availability finally opens up.

The headline numbers

As of 2026-07-20, our pool held 6,369 brandable name ideas with a recorded registry verdict: 783 available, 5,586 taken. Split those two groups by character count and the story is immediate. The average available name is 8.95 characters long, with a median of 9. The average taken name is 7.12 characters, with a median of 7. Nearly two full characters separate what you can register from what you cannot. The distributions barely overlap at the short end: only 5.1 percent of available names are 6 characters or fewer, while 41.3 percent of taken names are. Scarcity has a shape, and the shape is short.

Availability rate by exact length

Here is the availability rate at each character count in our dataset (buckets with a meaningful sample only): 4 characters: 0.0 percent available (0 of 564) 5 characters: 0.6 percent available (5 of 776) 6 characters: 3.5 percent available (35 of 1,007) 7 characters: 14.2 percent available (143 of 1,009) 8 characters: 13.0 percent available (141 of 1,082) 9 characters: 16.5 percent available (159 of 966) 10 characters: 27.2 percent available (164 of 603) 11 characters: 34.0 percent available (82 of 241) 12 characters: 39.8 percent available (35 of 88) The cliff between 6 and 7 characters is the single most striking feature: availability quadruples the moment a name crosses into 7 characters, and it keeps climbing from there. If you have been hunting for a 5-letter brand and coming up empty, this table is why. It is not your creativity, it is the registry.

Why short died first

The economics are simple: the supply of short strings is tiny and the demand is universal. There are only about 457,000 possible 4-letter combinations, and every one of them reads as short enough to be worth holding, whether or not it spells anything. Domain investors registered the entire 4-letter .com space years ago; our 0-for-564 result is not a sample anomaly, it is the census. At 5 and 6 characters the math loosens slightly but the pattern holds: real words and pronounceable strings were claimed in the 1990s and 2000s, and what expires gets caught by drop-catching services within seconds. Each added character multiplies the possibility space by 26, which is why availability recovers so quickly past 7 characters. By 10 characters the space is so large that even decades of registration have only picked over the most obvious combinations. Length is the one axis where the .com landrush genuinely never finished.

What this means for naming

First, stop treating a short name as the definition of a good name. The brands you admire are longer than you think: remember that a 9-character average describes the AVAILABLE pool, and plenty of beloved brands live there comfortably. Memorability comes from sound, imagery, and distinctiveness far more than from raw length. Second, aim your brainstorm at 7 to 12 characters. Below 7, you are fishing in water that our data says is 96 to 100 percent fished out. Above 12, nothing is wrong technically, but typeability and word-of-mouth start to strain. Third, get your length from structure, not padding. A 9-character name should be a clean two-word compound (two short words fused) or a coined word with one mutation, not a 6-character word with "hq" or "app" stapled on. The compound and coined styles are precisely where our availability data says the free names live, and they produce names that feel deliberate rather than settled-for.

Methodology, and what this dataset is not

The dataset is every name idea our generator has produced and verified, 6,369 names with a registry verdict at measurement time. Each verdict comes from RDAP, the ICANN-mandated registration data protocol, queried against the authoritative .com registry, with a conservative DNS fallback. A name counts as available only when the registry confirmed it unregistered at its last check. Two honest caveats. This is a sample of brandable candidate names, not a random sample of all possible strings: everything in it was generated to be a plausible brand (pronounceable, 4 to 15 characters, no hyphens or numbers), so it describes the naming space founders actually search, not the whole alphabet. And availability changes continuously as domains are registered and expire, so these are snapshot numbers from 2026-07-20; the live study page refreshes its own figures daily. The measurement script ships in our repository, so the run is reproducible against the registry at any time.

Frequently asked questions

How long is the average available .com domain?

In our registry-verified dataset of 6,369 brandable name ideas, available .coms average 8.95 characters (median 9), while taken names average 7.12 (median 7). The practical takeaway: the names you can still register are about two characters longer than the ones you cannot.

Are any 4-letter .com domains still available?

Effectively no. In our dataset, 0 of 564 brandable 4-character names were available, which matches the industry consensus that the entire 4-letter .com space has been registered for years. Any 4-letter .com you want will have to be bought on the aftermarket.

What length domain name should I aim for?

Seven to twelve characters. Below 7, availability in our data collapses to between 0 and 3.5 percent. From 7 to 9 characters roughly one name in seven is free, and at 10 to 12 characters it rises to roughly one in three or four. Above 12, availability keeps improving but typeability and word-of-mouth begin to suffer.

Does a longer domain name hurt SEO or branding?

Not in the ranges that matter. Search engines do not penalize a 10-character domain versus a 6-character one; rankings come from content and authority. Branding-wise, sound and distinctiveness beat raw length: a clean 9-character compound is easier to remember than a cryptic 5-character string.

Why does availability jump so much at 7 characters?

Combinatorics. Each added character multiplies the possible strings by 26, so the space of 7-plus-character names is vastly larger than the short space the landrush fully claimed. In our data, availability quadruples between 6 characters (3.5 percent) and 7 characters (14.2 percent).

How was this measured?

Every name our generator produces is checked against the authoritative .com registry via RDAP and stored with its verdict. We aggregated all 6,369 verified names on 2026-07-20 and split the statistics by character count. The dataset is brandable candidates (pronounceable, no hyphens or numbers), so it reflects the space founders actually search.

By the DomainGenius team. Every number here is an RDAP verdict from the live .com registry across 6,369 brandable names in our own dataset, measured 2026-07-20 and reproducible via the script in our repository.

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