Domain WHOIS & DNS Lookup: Registrar, Expiry, A/MX/NS

Domain WHOIS and DNS lookup in bulk: registrar, expiry date and days left for every domain in a list

domain	status	registrar	createdAt	expiresAt	daysToExpiry	nameservers
example.com	ok	RESERVED-Internet Assigned Numbers Authority	1995-08-14	2027-08-13	282	elliott.ns.cloudflare.com, hera.ns.cloudflare.com
python.org	ok	Gandi SAS	1995-03-27	2033-03-28	2336	ns-1134.awsdns-13.org, … (4)
apify.com	ok	Amazon Registrar, Inc.	2009-06-02	2035-06-02	3132	ns-1225.awsdns-25.org, … (4)
this-domain-should-not-exist-9f3k2.com	not_registered

(real output of test runs on 2026-11-04, shortened to 7 of the columns; rows also carry updated date, status codes, DNSSEC and A / MX / NS records)

For anyone who has to check many domains at once and is tired of pasting them one by one into a whois site: domain investors and brokers, agencies and IT teams that manage client domains, security and brand-protection teams, and SEO people vetting expired or competitor domains. It uses RDAP (the modern replacement for port-43 WHOIS, from the IANA bootstrap) and DNS over HTTPS (Cloudflare or Google). No scraping, no proxies, no API keys.

Try it: press Start with the prefilled example (example.com, python.org, apify.com). You get the first 3 rows above in about 5 seconds, charged as 3 domain lookups (less than a cent). Clear the Domains list and press Start for a free demo on 4 domains (example.com, python.org, wikipedia.org and one unregistered name; not charged, rows carry _demo: true).

Price: from $0.35 per 1,000 domain lookups on Apify's paid plans (the price shown on this page); $0.50 per 1,000 on the free plan. Unregistered, invalid, partial and failed lookups are not charged.

What it does

• WHOIS data via RDAP: registrar and its IANA ID, creation date, last-changed date, expiration date, days to expiry, expired flag, domain status codes (client transfer prohibited, …), nameservers, DNSSEC flag
• DNS records via DNS over HTTPS: A (IPv4), MX (with priority) and NS records, from Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) or Google Public DNS
• Registered or not: unregistered names come back as not_registered (and are free), so you can screen a list of names
• Messy input is fine: https://WWW.Example.com/page?x=1 becomes www.example.com, internationalized names become punycode, duplicates are removed, typos come back as invalid rows (free)
• TLDs without RDAP (several country domains): the row is built from DNS and marked dns_only
• Polite and robust: per-server connection and spacing limits, timeouts, up to 3 retries with backoff (honours Retry-After), one failing domain never stops the run

Privacy: no personal data

Registrant, administrative, technical and billing contacts are never read or output — no names, e-mails, phone numbers or addresses. Only the registrar (a company), dates, statuses and nameserver names are used. Every row carries registrantRedacted: true. E-mail addresses typed into the input are rejected as invalid, not looked up. (Many registries redact registrant data anyway since GDPR; this Actor does not depend on that.)

Input example

{
  "domains": ["example.com", "python.org", "https://www.apify.com/store"],
  "includeDns": true,
  "dnsResolver": "cloudflare",
  "concurrency": 5
}

Or point it at a dataset of another Actor with datasetId and domainField. An empty Domains list runs the free demo on four domains (not charged, rows carry _demo: true).

Output

One row per domain in the dataset (a table view for registration data and one for DNS records are included):

{
  "domain": "example.com",
  "status": "ok",
  "registered": true,
  "registrar": "Example Registrar, Inc.",
  "registrarIanaId": "9999",
  "createdAt": "2001-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "expiresAt": "2027-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "daysToExpiry": 100,
  "expired": false,
  "domainStatus": ["client transfer prohibited"],
  "nameservers": ["ns1.example.net", "ns2.example.net"],
  "dnssecSigned": false,
  "dnsA": ["192.0.2.1"],
  "dnsMx": ["10 mail.example.com"],
  "dnsNs": ["ns1.example.net", "ns2.example.net"],
  "rdapServer": "rdap.example-registry.test",
  "rdapDomain": "example.com",
  "registrantRedacted": true,
  "error": null,
  "checkedAt": "2026-10-21T09:00:00Z"
}

(Made-up placeholder values that show the shape of a row.) status is one of:

status	meaning	charged
ok	RDAP registration data returned	yes
dns_only	the TLD has no RDAP service; DNS records returned	yes
not_registered	the registry says the name is not registered	no
partial	RDAP failed (see error) but DNS answered	no
invalid	not a valid domain name	no
error	the lookup failed (timeout, rate limit, server error; see error)	no

The record SUMMARY in the key-value store counts each status and the number of charged domains.

Use cases

• Watch a portfolio of client or brand domains for upcoming expiry (daysToExpiry below 30)
• Screen thousands of candidate names: which are registered, since when, with which registrar
• Find which domains still point to old nameservers or mail servers before a migration
• Enrich a list of domains from another scraper with registrar, age and DNS data

Limits (cannot be raised by input)

• 50,000 domains per run; up to 10 in parallel; at most 2 connections to one server at a time, at least 0.2 s between requests to the same server
• Each request has a timeout (default 15 s, max 60 s) and is retried at most 3 times
• RDAP data comes from the registry or registrar of each TLD and can differ slightly between them (some omit the updated date, for example). Servers may answer with rate limits under heavy load; those domains come back as error and are not charged, so you can run them again
• Expiry dates are the registry's; a domain in a grace period can show a past date (expired: true)

Pricing

Event	Free plan	Paid plans (Store discount tiers Bronze / Silver / Gold)
Domain lookup (registration data or, for TLDs without RDAP, DNS records returned)	$0.50 per 1,000	$0.45 / $0.40 / $0.35 per 1,000

The price on this page ("from $0.35") is the Gold tier price. Unregistered, invalid, partial and failed lookups are free. Set a maximum charge per run to cap spend; the Actor stops cleanly when it is reached. On the Apify Free plan, the $5 of monthly platform credit covers about 10,000 domains a month — enough to try it on real data.

FAQ

Is this the same as WHOIS? It returns the same kind of registration data, through RDAP, the protocol ICANN requires registries and registrars to run. It does not connect to port-43 WHOIS servers. Why is there no owner name? By design (see Privacy). The Actor is for domain status, expiry and DNS checks, not for finding people. Why dns_only for some domains? A few country TLDs publish no RDAP service. You still get the DNS records and a registered flag. Why do .uk domains show no registrar or dates? The .uk registry's terms forbid commercial copying of its data, so .uk names (including .co.uk) are not looked up in its RDAP. They come back from DNS only: dns_only with the DNS records when the name exists (charged like other dns_only rows), not_registered when DNS says it does not exist (not charged). Can I check subdomains? Yes. DNS records are those of the exact name you give. Registration data belongs to the registered domain, so for www.example.com the Actor looks up example.com and shows it in rdapDomain. (It has no public-suffix list: for names under multi-part suffixes such as co.uk, give the registered domain itself.)

More tools from the same developer

• DNS Records Lookup — bulk DNS lookup: A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT, SPF and DMARC per domain
• Domain Availability Checker — bulk domain availability check via RDAP: registered or likely available
• Bulk URL Status Checker — bulk HTTP status and redirect-chain checker for URL lists
• Website Technology Detector — tech stack of websites in bulk: CMS, frameworks, analytics and tag IDs, CDN, consent tools
• Sitemap URL Extractor — list every URL of a website from its sitemaps