Nominet reserves several .uk namespaces behind an eligibility test. Nothing stops you winning one at the drop. Something stops you keeping it.
If you buy .uk domains at any volume you will eventually put money on a name ending
.ltd.uk or .net.uk. They appear in every drop list, they are cheap,
and the good ones are short dictionary words that vanished from .co.uk two decades
ago. It looks like an inefficiency in the market.
It is not. Those namespaces are reserved, and the eligibility test is applied when the
registration is made, not when you try to use it.
What is actually open
Three third level namespaces are open to anybody, along with second level
.uk. If it is a plain .co.uk you are after, our guide to
where to buy a .co.uk domain compares what ten registrars
actually charge:
| Namespace | Who can register it |
|---|
| .co.uk | Anybody |
| .org.uk | Anybody |
| .me.uk | Anybody |
| .uk | Anybody, subject to the rights of the matching .co.uk holder |
What is not, and why
| Namespace | The requirement |
|---|
| .ltd.uk | A registered limited company whose name matches the
domain. Not any limited company. Yours. |
| .plc.uk | The same test, for a public limited company. |
| .net.uk | A network provider with a valid RIPE registration. |
| .sch.uk | Schools, applied for through an agent. |
| .ac.uk | Recognised further and higher education bodies. |
| .gov.uk, .mod.uk, .nhs.uk, .police.uk | Public bodies. Not commercially
available. |
The .ltd.uk rule is the one that catches people, because it sounds like a
general business namespace and reads like one. It is closer to a trade mark register. A company
called Widgets Limited can hold widgets.ltd.uk and nothing else.
What happens if you register one anyway
This is the part worth knowing, because it is not what most people assume.
You do not end up holding a domain you cannot point anywhere. We tested this the expensive
way in September 2026 on two .net.uk names. Both registrations went through at the
drop. Nominet then refused delegation under clause 12 of the Rules of Registration, and the
registrations were reversed. Checked at the registry afterwards, both returned
"this domain name has not been registered". We were not the sponsoring registrar. There was
nothing to delete, sell or transfer.
So the cost is not a dead asset. The cost is the attempt. If you are drop
catching, every request you fire at a name you cannot hold is spent out of a finite budget of
attempts, and it wins nothing. Two of ours were fired at names that were never available to us
in the first place.
The practical rule
Screen the namespace before anything else, ahead of length, backlinks or search volume,
which are the checks in what makes
an expired domain worth buying. It is
the cheapest filter in the pipeline and it is absolute: no score is high enough to make a
.ltd.uk worth a shot if the name is not your company.
We enforce it in the database rather than in the code that does the scoring. A scoring script
can be bypassed by the next scoring script somebody writes. A constraint on the table cannot.
Next: How .uk domain drop catching actually works