_for-sale DNS records tell brokers a domain is on the market

In July 2026 the IETF published RFC 10023, an informational document that defines a new DNS convention: a TXT record at the reserved leaf name _for-sale. A record published at _for-sale.example.com signals that example.com, although registered and resolving normally, is available for purchase. The name is registered with IANA as a reserved DNS leaf node.

What the record contains

The format is deliberately small: _for-sale IN TXT "v=FORSALE1;furi=https://example.com/for-sale". Every record carries a mandatory version tag followed by at most one tag=value pair. Four tags are defined: ftxt for free human-readable text, furi for a contact or information URI (https, mailto and tel are the usable schemes), fval for an asking price with an uppercase currency code and amount (for example EUR2500.00), and fcod for a proprietary code shared by prior agreement.

The first misconception the document clears up is that this is a form of parking. It is close to the opposite. Parking replaces the site with a sales page and costs the owner every visitor the domain still has. A _for-sale record sits beside a live site in DNS and says nothing to a browser: the homepage keeps serving, mail keeps flowing, and the record can be added or removed at will. The convention is explicitly designed to work while the domain remains in active use.

Why the convention exists

WHOIS and RDAP answer the question "is this name registered?" — but a registered name may still be purchasable. That gap is the whole reason the record exists. The intended audience is brokersThe intended audience is brokers and automated availability services: they resolve a name anyway, so one extra lookup tells them what a rendered page cannot, because nothing on a working homepage says that the domain underneath is negotiable.

Getting the details right

The version tag is mandatory and case-sensitive — every record starts with v=FORSALE1;. Publish one tag=value pair per recordPublish one tag=value pair per record (the pairs do not concatenate; this is not SPF), one character-string of at most 255 octets, and a TTL of 3600 seconds or less. Place it at a leaf: _for-sale.example.com is valid at any level of the tree, but xyz._for-sale.example.com is not, and records under .arpa must be ignored. Remove the record when the domain is no longer for sale, since absence is the only way to say no, and sign the zone with DNSSEC — an unsigned TXT record asserting your domain is for sale is easy to forge.

Mistakes and verification

The RFC calls out publishing the record aspirationally — a record that exists to lure enquiries is abuse the document names directly. An advertised fval price is indicative, not a purchase commitment. On the reading side, ftxt and furi are attacker-controlled, so sanitise before display and never auto-navigate to a furi target without explicit confirmation. Verification is one query: dig +short TXT _for-sale.example.com should return an answer beginning with v=FORSALE1; and a TTL of 3600 or lower.