New gTLD 2026: what we know after the application window closed
By CaptainDNS
Published on August 24, 2026
- The application window closed on August 12, 2026 at 23:59 UTC, after 105 days.
- ICANN received more than 1,600 primary applications; more than 1,100 include a replacement string.
- As of August 24, ICANN had not published a final total after payment. The available figures remain provisional.
- Reveal Day must take place no later than nine weeks after closing, barring extraordinary circumstances.
- Brands must wait for the strings to be published before assessing collisions, contentions, and confusion risks.
The window is closed. And yet, nobody knows the list of extensions that were requested. That is the odd place ICANN's New gTLD 2026 program now finds itself: the counter no longer accepts applications, but the market cannot inspect them yet.
The first numbers already give a sense of the round's scale. More than 1,600 primary applications were submitted, and most arrived in the final days. Yet the final figure depends on a far less dramatic operation: the collection of evaluation fees. As of August 24, 2026, ICANN had published no definitive count.
This report therefore takes a snapshot of the program on a specific date. It separates the announced facts, the steps set out in the Applicant Guidebook, and the questions that remain open. The goal is not to explain how to apply: it is too late for this round. It is to know what to monitor now, whether you manage a brand, a domain portfolio, a registrar, a hosting provider, or a DNS infrastructure.
The window closed after 105 days
The submission period ran from April 30 to August 12, 2026 at 23:59 UTC. It lasted 15 weeks, or 105 days.
Applicants went through TAMS, ICANN's application management system. At closing time, the system was supposed to block new submissions. No late filing was planned. This rule draws a clear line between a submitted application and a draft left sitting in the system.
ICANN announced on August 13 that it had received more than 1,600 primary applications. That threshold does not say how many distinct strings were requested. Several applicants can target the same string, and strings judged similar can end up in the same contention set. An application is therefore neither a unique extension nor a future delegation.
Filing clustered toward the end of the window. ICANN notes that most applications arrived in the final days, without publishing a day-by-day breakdown. That detail matters for reading the volume: the threshold announced right after closing is a raw count, not a consolidated result.
Why does the total remain provisional?
An application does not move forward if the evaluation fees are not received within the applicable deadline. The base fee is 227,000 USD per application, excluding conditional evaluations and certain variant cases.
ICANN had to receive full payment by the later of two deadlines: August 19, 2026 at 23:59 UTC, or seven days after the invoice was sent. An invoice sent on August 14, for example, pushed the limit to August 21 at 23:59 UTC. The August 19 date was therefore not a universal cutoff.
As of August 24, no official announcement gave the number of paid applications kept for the next stage. Claiming an exact total would be premature. It is also worth avoiding an arbitrary drop-out rate borrowed from 2012: the price, the rules, and applicant preparation have all changed.
What do the 1,100 replacement strings mean?
More than 1,100 primary applications include at least one secondary application for a replacement string. These secondary files do not add to the primary volume as 1,100 future independent gTLDs.
The mechanism was designed to reduce certain contentions. Before closing, an applicant could submit a primary string and one or more replacement strings. After Reveal Day, there will be a set period to decide whether to keep the primary string or activate an already filed replacement string. Applicants will not be able to invent a new string at that point.
This nuance changes how the headlines should be read. "More than 1,600 primary applications" measures the projects that entered the round. "More than 1,100 with a replacement" measures the use of a fallback option. Adding the two would produce a misleading number.
Does a replacement string avoid all contention?
No. A replacement string can itself be identical or judged similar to another string. It gives the applicant a choice; it does not automatically reserve a path with no competitor.
The timeline makes the decision delicate. Reveal Day will publish the public parts of the applications and the strings likely to be in competition. A 14-day replacement period is to follow. The applicant will then decide with more information, but on a short deadline. The final list of strings will not be set until String Confirmation Day.
For observers, Reveal Day will therefore deliver a first map, not the final land registry. Brand monitoring that stops that day risks keeping alerts on strings that are later replaced. Conversely, waiting for String Confirmation Day can cost time when preparing an objection or a comment.
Administrative review comes before public transparency
ICANN first checks that submitted and paid applications meet the program's administrative requirements. Only applications that pass this review are supposed to appear on Reveal Day.
The review does not prejudge the outcome of the substantive evaluations. It mainly verifies that the application can enter processing. Examinations of the string, the applicant, the financial and operational capabilities, and the safeguard measures come next, depending on the applicable path.
The closing announcement sets a public boundary: barring extraordinary circumstances, Reveal Day must take place no later than nine weeks after August 12. That places the limit around mid-October 2026. ICANN planned to announce the exact date and the schedule of the following milestones in September.
There is no promise in that announcement of a Reveal Day nine months after closing. That duration sometimes circulates because it is confused with the whole evaluation process, which is much longer. For the initial publication of applications, the correct unit is the week.
What Reveal Day will make public
Reveal Day is to publish the public parts of the applications that passed the administrative review. The public will be able to see the requested strings, the public identity of the applicants, and the contentions identified at that stage.
Information that is protected or designated confidential under the program's rules will not be posted online in full. Reveal Day is not an opening of all internal files. It is enough, all the same, to launch the competitive and legal analysis.
Three readings will need to begin the same day. The first will look for exact strings matching a brand. The second will widen to visual, phonetic, and semantic similarities. The third will look at the applicant, the declared business model, and any IDN variants. A simple Ctrl+F on a company name would miss a good part of the risk.
What steps follow Reveal Day?
Reveal Day opens the public sequence: comments, objections, string confirmation, evaluations, and contention resolution. The exact order for a given application depends on its type and the issues encountered.
The public will be able to submit comments on applications. The objection procedures cover distinct grounds, including string confusion, legal rights, limited public interest, and community opposition. These paths have their own criteria, costs, and deadlines. A public comment is not a disguised formal objection.
Governments also step in through the Governmental Advisory Committee, notably through advice addressed to the Board. In parallel, strings go through evaluations such as similarity, DNS stability, reserved names, name collisions, and, depending on the case, geographic review.
The String Confirmation Day comes after the replacement period. ICANN will then publish the final list of retained strings. A prioritization draw will then order the processing, since more than 1,600 applications cannot all move forward at the same time.
How do contention sets work?
A contention set groups applications that cannot all succeed as they stand. The obvious case is an exact string requested by several applicants; confusing similarity can also link different strings.
Applicants can exit a contention through the authorized mechanisms, including the community priority evaluation for certain community applications and the ICANN auction as a last resort. The 2026 Guidebook prohibits private resolutions that would amount to paying a competitor to withdraw its application. That is a notable difference from the practices observed after 2012.
A brand must therefore not confuse "requested string" with "won string". Between the two lie the objections, the evaluation, a possible contention, the registry agreement, the pre-delegation tests, and insertion into the root. A long road.
What the 2012 round lets us compare, and nothing more
The 2012 round received 1,930 applications and led to more than 1,200 delegations. As of June 30, 2026, ICANN statistics counted 1,241 delegated gTLDs from that round.
These numbers give an order of magnitude, not a conversion rate applicable to 2026. The previous round produced about 1,400 unique strings and 234 contention sets. It also saw 653 withdrawn applications according to the June 2026 count. An application could fail, be abandoned, or remain stuck in a procedure for years.
The new round has changed several pieces of the mechanism. Replacement strings provide a prepared exit from certain contentions. RSPs are evaluated in a separate program. Applicant support opened well before the main window. The rules on private auctions have also been revised.
Comparing 1,600 to 1,930 remains tempting, but the "more than" qualifier already rules out any precise calculation. We will have to wait for the paid total, then for the number of unique strings and the contentions. Before that, calling the round "smaller" or "almost as large" is commentary, not measurement.
The side programs have already changed the landscape
The Applicant Support Program and the RSP Evaluation Program run alongside the main filing. They address two different obstacles: access to the program and the technical capacity to operate a registry.
Applicant Support Program
The ASP targeted entities that would not have had the financial means or resources to apply on their own. Its window opened on November 19, 2024. It closed to new applications on November 19, 2025, with a deadline of December 19 for certain applications already in progress.
Qualified applicants can receive a 75% to 85% reduction on evaluation fees, along with non-financial support. The percentage depends on the final number of beneficiaries. This qualification does not amount to approval of a gTLD: the supported applicant must still file a primary application and go through the same applicable evaluations.
The program also provides an auction credit of up to 35% of the winning bid, capped at 1.75 million USD per eligible application. This only comes into play if the application reaches an ICANN auction. It does not resolve a valid objection or a technical weakness.
RSP Evaluation Program
The RSP program separates the evaluation of the technical provider from that of the requested string. Each gTLD applicant will have to designate one or more evaluated RSPs before its application is evaluated.
ICANN published a first list of evaluated providers on January 30, 2026, then expanded it. A second and final RSP window ran from April 30 to August 12. The list will continue to evolve as providers complete their tests.
This separation is directly relevant to registrars and hosting providers. It concentrates the operation of functions such as authoritative DNS, EPP, RDAP, DNSSEC, and data escrow in operators vetted upstream. It does not make all RSPs interchangeable: IDN coverage, additional services, capacity, commercial terms, and architecture still need to be compared.
What brands should monitor right now
A brand that did not apply can still act on monitoring and defending its rights. The closing of the window does not close the public procedures.
Before Reveal Day, the domain team can consolidate its inventory of trademarks, transliterations, product names, abbreviations, and regulated terms. A pass through the RDAP Lookup tool lets you check the current state of records and their holders. Legal counsel should be brought in early enough to decide which signals would justify an objection. Waiting for the publication to look up rights holders wastes days for nothing.
On publication day, keep a dated copy of the results and classify each match. An exact string does not carry the same level of risk as a nearby generic term. Also document the applicants, the declared uses, and the variants. The file should remain readable by someone who has not followed the round since 2024.
Security teams will look beyond trademark law. A similar new string can feed phishing or confusion, but its operation is not immediate: it still has to win, sign a contract, and be delegated. The right reflex is to prepare detection without announcing an active threat before it exists.
What DNS professionals, registrars, and hosting providers should prepare
Operators must first track the final strings and the selected RSPs. Commercial volumes and launch dates remain unknown at the application stage.
A registrar can map the extensions that match its markets, then monitor the contracts, the Sunrise periods, and the eligibility rules. Nothing yet justifies promising a catalog. Between Reveal Day and the opening of registrations, each registry will follow its own path.
For DNS and email teams, the subject is more discreet. The new TLDs will have to enter the public suffix lists, the validation rules, the anti-abuse filters, and the interfaces that still hard-code a frozen list of extensions. A regular expression limited to a few historical TLDs will break. It was already breaking before this round, to be honest.
Hosting providers will also need to distinguish syntactic acceptance from trust. Accepting an address under a new TLD does not mean lifting reputation checks. Conversely, blocking all unknown extensions creates false positives from the very first delegations.
Action plan until Reveal Day
The useful work comes down to dated monitoring, named responsibilities, and reaction criteria written before the publication.
- List the brands, language variants, and sensitive strings to monitor.
- Designate one person responsible for the Reveal Day date announcement expected in September.
- Prepare a grid that separates exact match, similarity, and generic term.
- Agree with legal on the thresholds for comment, objection, or simple monitoring.
- Check that your applications accept new TLDs without a hard-coded list.
- Redo the analysis on String Confirmation Day to remove the replaced strings.
- Then follow the evaluations, contentions, contracts, and delegations application by application.
The trap would be to treat Reveal Day as a verdict. It will be a massive, imperfect publication, followed by changes. The monitoring must keep the history: primary string, any replacement, status, applicant, and next deadline.
What we still do not know as of August 24, 2026
Four data points are still missing: the paid total, the number of unique primary strings, the breakdown by application type, and the composition of the contention sets.
We also do not know the share of .brand, community applications, geographic names, IDNs, or variants. The names of the applicants remain hidden until Reveal Day. Any commercial list published before that date therefore rests on voluntary disclosures, rumors, or extrapolations.
The exact date of Reveal Day has not been announced. ICANN has only promised a communication in September and a publication no later than nine weeks after closing, barring an exceptional event. This boundary should be presented as an operational target, not an absolute guarantee.
Finally, no overall delegation date can be inferred. Some applications will move faster; others will hit an objection, a contention, or an additional evaluation. The round is starting to become observable. It is far from over.
Frequently asked questions
FAQ
How many New gTLD 2026 applications were submitted?
ICANN announced more than 1,600 primary applications at the close on August 12, 2026. The final total of paid applications had not been published as of August 24.
When will the 2026 round's Reveal Day take place?
ICANN is to announce the exact date in September 2026. Barring extraordinary circumstances, the publication must take place no later than nine weeks after the August 12 closing.
Is a replacement string a second, independent application?
No. It is tied to a primary application and provides an option prepared before closing. The applicant will be able to choose during the replacement period planned after Reveal Day.
Will Reveal Day provide the final list of future extensions?
No. It will publish the applications that passed the administrative review. Replacements, withdrawals, objections, evaluations, and contentions can still modify the list.
Can a brand that did not apply still take action?
Yes. It can monitor the published strings, comment on an application, and, if the criteria are met, use an objection procedure. The choice depends on the right invoked and the case.
How many new gTLDs will ultimately be delegated?
Nobody can calculate that at this stage. An application can be withdrawn, rejected, lose a contention, or fail to reach the contract and delegation.
Is the 2026 program the same as the 2012 round?
No. The framework reuses part of the 2012 path but adds, notably, replacement strings, the separate RSP evaluation, and new contention rules.
Glossary
- gTLD: a generic top-level domain, placed to the right of the final dot in a domain name.
- String: the label requested as a future TLD, without the leading dot in ICANN documents.
- Contention: a situation in which several applications cannot all succeed because of identical or similar strings.
- Reveal Day: the publication of the public parts of the applications that passed the administrative review.
- String Confirmation Day: the date on which ICANN publishes the final list after the replacement choices.
- RSP: a provider that supplies a registry's technical functions, including DNS, EPP, and RDAP.
- Delegation: the addition of the TLD to the DNS root zone after contract and checks.
📚 Related ICANN and .brand guides
- ICANN 2026 Next Round: introduction - Timeline, process, and opportunities in the new gTLD round.
- 2026 gTLD budget: complete costs - All application and operating costs, from USD 350K to 450K for a .brand.
- .brand gTLD risks: 6 scenarios and contingency plans - Anticipate risks before applying: auction, withdrawal, migration, and M&A.
