Domain name prices by length: what .coms sold for
Three-letter .coms sell for a median of nearly $40,000. Four letters, $3,000. After eight, the price barely moves. The full curve.
Short .com names sell for far more, and the price falls off a cliff, then a gentle slope. Three letters: a median of $39,600. Four: $3,000. Eight: $2,379. Fifteen: $1,940. Past about eight characters, extra length barely moves the price.
Everyone says "shorter is better." It's true, but how much better is the useful part, and it isn't a smooth line. We measured it on 30,159 letters-only .com sales since January 1, 2025, drawn from about 43,301 reported sales in all. Here's what they show.
The curve
First, the part the chart can't hold. A three-letter .com is a different market: 73 sales in nearly two years, a median of $39,600, and 18% of them at $100,000 or more. Every one of the 73 reached at least $10,000. There are only 17,576 possible three-letter combinations and every good one is owned. Sales are rare, and when they happen they're big. Everything else:
The same data, as a table
| Length | Median | Middle half | $10k or more | Sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 letters | $39,600 | $24,000 to $76,000 | 100% | 73 |
| 4 letters | $3,000 | $1,680 to $6,806 | 16% | 1,147 |
| 5 letters | $2,750 | $1,580 to $5,000 | 12% | 1,472 |
| 6 letters | $2,550 | $1,500 to $4,500 | 8% | 2,147 |
| 8 letters | $2,379 | $1,476 to $4,000 | 7% | 2,945 |
| 10 letters | $2,111 | $1,400 to $3,600 | 5% | 3,239 |
| 12 letters | $2,000 | $1,325 to $3,351 | 4% | 2,921 |
| 15 letters | $1,940 | $1,325 to $3,050 | 3% | 2,284 |
"Middle half" is the 25th to the 75th percentile: half of all sales landed in that band. Use it, not the median, when you want to know what a name like yours might fetch.
Four letters: the median lies a little
The four-letter median is $3,000, which sounds like a decent step up from five letters at $2,750. It isn't the whole story. The middle half runs from $1,680 to $6,806, and the top tenth starts at $16,000. About 16% of four-letter sales hit $10,000. Four-letter names are a lottery with a decent floor. The split is real words against everything else: four-letter names that are dictionary words had a median of $4,399 (489 sales), the rest $2,550 (658 sales). Length alone can't tell them apart.
Past eight letters, it's a gentle slide
From eight letters ($2,379) to fifteen ($1,940), the median drops by 18% over seven extra letters. That's about $63 per character. The share of sales at $10,000 or more falls from 7% to 3%.
So if you own a ten-letter name and you're wondering whether the extra letters are costing you, they are, a little. If you're wondering whether trimming to nine would transform it, it wouldn't. What a name means and who wants it matters far more than the letter count in the middle of the market.
Numbers behave differently
All-digit .com names don't follow the letter curve. Four-digit numerics have a median of $11,200 (206 sales), which is nearly four times the four-letter median. By five digits it has dropped to $2,144 (274 sales) and by six to $2,000. There are only 10,000 four-digit numbers, a finite and well-known market with buyers who collect them. Five- and six-digit ones are far less liquid. There's more in what makes a domain valuable.
What these numbers can't tell you
- It's a floor, not the whole market. We only count reported sales of $1,000 or more, because reports below that are patchy. Cheaper names exist in huge numbers. Every median here is the median of sales over $1,000, not of all names.
- It's sold, not listed. Asking prices run far higher. A list of what's for sale at $5,000 doesn't tell you what the market paid.
- It's reported sales. Private deals and sales nobody posts are missing. High-profile sales are more likely to be reported than dull ones, so the true median is probably a bit lower.
- It's .com only. Other extensions have their own curves, not these.
- The medians are steady. The overall median for reported .com sales has sat between about $1,922 and $2,165 in every year since 2016. If you're waiting for the market to "come back," look at that number: it hasn't moved.
What to do with this
Take your name's length, find that row, and use the middle-half band as a first guess. Then adjust it with sales of names like yours, not just names the same length. How to find real comparable sales shows how, and how to price a name for sale turns the number into an ask. If you want the robot's view of one specific name, the appraiser takes ten seconds.
The data, for the record. About 142,183 reported .com sales of $1,000 or more from 2012 to October 2026, merged from multiple sources and de-duplicated; wholesale auction sales excluded. The curve and table use 43,301 sales since January 1, 2025, and the letters-only lengths shown. Figures are recomputed from the data, not typed in.