Is domain flipping still profitable?

Sometimes, but the figures that are published suggest most names never sell. Every name costs a fee each year you hold it, and when one does sell, the marketplace takes a share. Before you put money in, work out what holding a set of names will cost you against what a single sale would have to fetch.

What flipping is

Domain flipping, or domain investing, is getting a domain name in order to sell it to someone else for more. You do not build anything on the name. The profit, if there is one, is the gap between what the name cost you to get and keep, and what a buyer finally pays.

There are two ways in. You can register a name nobody holds, at a registrar's normal price, and wait for someone to want it. Or you can buy a name someone already holds (sellers often call these premium names). That costs far more up front, so the sale has to be much bigger before you come out ahead.

What it costs to hold a name

You never pay for a domain name once. You pay a registrar every year, or for a few years at a time, whether the name sells or not. These are VentraIP's published prices on 21 October 2026:

The .com.au first year is a discount on its usual $22.95. Other registrars charge more or less, but the pattern holds: a small fee, every year, for every name. For .com.au and .au, auDA's licensing rules let you pay for one to five years at a time.

When a name sells, the marketplace or broker takes a cut. Sedo advertises selling fees "starting at just 10%". Dotto, which is a marketplace and earns a commission on each sale, charges the seller 12.5% of the price (GST included) plus a platform fee of 1.7% and 30 cents when the buyer pays with an Australian card (its fees).

How often names sell

Few do, on the only figures we could find, and those come from a marketplace describing itself.

Sedo, which calls itself the world's largest domain marketplace, says it has more than 24 million names listed and has made 700,000 sales since it began (Sedo's own figures, with no date given). Set side by side, its sales across its whole history come to fewer than one for every thirty names it lists today. That is not a yearly sell-through rate, and it is Sedo's own claim, but it shows the scale: on a big marketplace, most names wait.

The big sales are the ones you hear about. DN Journal, a trade publication that collects publicly reported sales, keeps a chart of the year's 100 biggest reported country-code sales. To 4 October 2026, a sale needed at least US$50,000 to make the list, and one .com.au appeared on it: LGT.com.au, at AUD $120,000. Most names on the chart are short, often a single word or a few letters, and most of them end in .ai (82 of the 101 entries). DN Journal also notes that many sales at the very top go unreported because of non-disclosure agreements. Either way, a chart of the biggest sales tells you about the top of the market, not about what a typical name earns.

One more thing to keep straight. A price on a marketplace listing is what the holder is asking, not what anyone has paid.

The Australian rules

A .com.au or .au name is a licence under auDA's rules, and those rules shape what a flipper can do with it. Every rule below is from the licensing rules.

You must be eligible to hold the name. For .com.au and .net.au you must be a commercial entity, such as a company or an ABN holder, and the name must match something you have, for example: your company, business or personal name, your Australian trade mark, or the name of a service you provide or goods you sell at the time you apply (rule 2.4.4). So a plain word for a trade only qualifies as the name of a service if you actually provide that service when you apply. A .au direct name needs only an Australian presence (rule 2.4.3).

So must your buyer. On the day of a transfer, the new holder has to meet the same rules (rule 2.13.2). A .com.au can only ever be sold to someone eligible for that name, which shrinks the pool of buyers.

You must stay eligible. If you stop being eligible during the licence, the name may be suspended or cancelled (rule 2.11.7).

Warehousing is banned in some .au names. The rules define "Domain Name Monetisation" as taking out a licence "with the sole purpose of selling, leasing or holding" the name to make money, and say it "includes warehousing". It is prohibited in org.au, asn.au, id.au, edu.au and the state and territory names (rule 2.4.13), and you must not register a name in most of those just to transfer it (rule 2.4.14). The ban does not list .com.au, .net.au or .au, but the eligibility rule above still applies to every .com.au you hold.

You cannot lease the name out. You must not rent, lease or sub-licence a .au name to anyone else, other than a related Australian company (rule 2.11.12).

Trade marks can cost you the name. Under the auDRP, someone can complain if your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to their company, business or personal name or trade mark. If they also show you have no legitimate interest in it and registered or used it in bad faith, a panel can cancel your licence, or transfer it to them if they are eligible to hold it. Search Australian Trade Mark Search before you register anything.

Tax

We could not find an ATO page about profits from buying and selling domain names. The ATO's ruling on website costs, TR 2016/3, says the right to use a domain name is a CGT asset, but that ruling is written for a business using a name for its own website. It does not deal with buying names to resell them. Ask an accountant how your sales would be taxed before you start, not after the first one.

A worked example (illustrative)

Say you register ten .com names at $24.95 a year and hold them for three years. In the third year, one sells for $1,000 through a marketplace charging the fees above: 12.5% commission, and 1.7% plus 30 cents. The other nine do not sell.

The arithmetic: ten names at $24.95 is $249.50 a year, so $748.50 over three years. On the sale, the commission is $125.00 and the platform fee is $17.30, so you receive $857.70. That leaves $109.20, before tax, after three years of waiting. The nine unsold names cost another $224.55 for each year you keep them.

A single sale has to reach about $873 just to cover those three years of fees. If you bought the names rather than registering them, add what you paid on top. And if no sale comes, the left-hand column is your result. These figures are made up to show the sums, not to predict an outcome.

So, is it worth it?

You can make money selling domain names. People do, and a name you hold because it was your own business name can find a buyer. As a plan to make money, though, flipping is a bet with a known cost and an unknown payoff: the fees arrive every year, and the sale may never come.

If you still want to try it: