This article explains the process of registering a SLD .au domain.

*In this article : AuDA refers to the registry of the Australian domains.

Requirements:

Registration of domains directly under .au will be available to any business or individual that fulfills the Australian Presence requirements (see https://www.auda.org.au/policy/au-domain-administration-rules-licensing and https://www.auda.org.au/policy/au-domain-administration-rules-au-namespace-implementation for details).

There are no restrictions or conditions on the string that can be applied for registration under.au (i.e., unlike com.au, there is no necessity for the string to match a corporate name or a trademark*).

* PLEASE NOTE:

The domain applied for must match the Trademark only if the applicant is not situated in Australia and uses an Australian Trademark to establish their Australian Presence.

Availability checks for second level .AU domains:

Unfortunately, the.AU Registry Operator only plans to conduct availability checks on 2nd level.AU domains that are accessible on the launch date (March 24, 2022 at 2am UTC). This means that we won't be able to provide reliable results for.AU availability checks until then.

General Availability applications

From March 24th, 2022, any string that is not already registered under one of the existing .au 3rd level extensions or is otherwise reserved by the Registry will be accessible for registration on a first-come, first-served basis.

Any applicant who meets the Australian presence criterion can place a preorder for any .au string that is available. Following that, these orders will be submitted to the Registry in the order in which they were received on Launch Day.

Validation of Natural Persons applying to register a .AU domain name

Before submitting an application to the Registry, we are obligated to check the details of anyone applying for a .au domain.

This form of validation is already included into the usual registration procedure for 3rd level extensions like com.au that are restricted to Australian businesses, utilizing the ABN/ACN numbers supplied in the domain registration command.

We will need to validate the applicant's data before submitting their orders to the Registry because 2nd level.au domains are available to Natural Persons as well.

More details on this validation service is available here : .AU : Validation of Natural Persons

Please keep in mind that Resellers can place pre-orders on behalf of Natural Persons and then complete the Contact Handle validation once the new validation service is ready (but no later than Mar 23, 2022, to allow enough time for us to prepare the submission of the registration order).