Domain owners who want to sell their sites have long had no reliable way to signal their willingness to potential buyers. Cold emails to WHOIS contacts often fail due to privacy redaction, and interested parties can’t distinguish genuine offers from spam. A new standard, RFC 10023, addresses this gap by defining a _for-sale DNS record.
The convention works by publishing a TXT record at _for-sale.example.com to indicate that example.com is available for purchase. Unlike domain parking, which replaces a site with a sales page and loses visitors, the _for-sale record sits invisibly in DNS alongside a fully operational website. Browsers never see it—only machines checking whether a domain is for sale.
According to the specification, the record carries a mandatory version tag (v=FORSALE1) followed by one tag-value pair. Domain owners can specify:
- ftxt=: Free human-readable text (e.g., “Serious offers only”)
- furi=: A contact or information URI (https, mailto, or tel schemes)
- fval=: An asking price in uppercase currency code and amount (e.g., “USD12500”)
- fcod=: A proprietary code for prior agreements
For example: _for-sale IN TXT "v=FORSALE1;furi=https://example.com/for-sale"
The intended audience is brokers and automated availability services, not individuals browsing the web. Since these services already resolve domain names to check availability, one additional DNS lookup reveals what no working homepage could—that the domain is negotiable.
Implementation requires publishing a single TXT record at the _for-sale leaf of a zone. Key rules include keeping the TTL at 3600 seconds or less to prevent stale information, placing the record only at leaf nodes, and removing it entirely when the domain is no longer for sale. The specification recommends DNSSEC signing to prevent forgery, as unsigned records advertising a price and contact URI are vulnerable to spoofing.
The record carries no legal obligation. An advertised price is indicative only, and publishing the signal does not commit the holder to sell. Users of the system should treat ftxt and furi values as attacker-controlled and sanitize them before display, never auto-navigating to a URI without explicit confirmation.
Common mistakes include cramming multiple tag-value pairs into one record (the format requires one pair per record), publishing aspirationally without genuine intent to sell, and assuming wildcards can cover entire zones.
Key facts
- RFC 10023 defines _for-sale as a reserved DNS leaf node name, registered with IANA, allowing domains to signal availability without removing live sites
- The _for-sale TXT record sits in DNS alongside operational websites and is invisible to browsers; only machines checking for-sale status see it
- Domain owners can include contact URIs, asking prices, or free-text information in the DNS record, with each attribute published as a separate record
- The convention targets brokers and automated availability services rather than individual buyers, enabling machine-readable domain-sale signals
- RFC 10023 explicitly states the record is designed to work while domains are still in active use, unlike traditional domain parking