How ICANN Monthly Registry Reports Work: Activity and Transaction Data Explained
A comprehensive guide to the contractual monthly CSV reports every gTLD operator must submit to ICANN, including domain counts, grace periods, and schema variations.
Every contracted generic top-level domain registry operator is legally obligated under Specification 3 of the ICANN Registry Agreement to file two monthly operational reports: the Registry Activity Report and the Registry Transactions Report.
These reports constitute the single most authoritative dataset on the domain name industry. Unlike third-party zone file scrapes or DNS polling mechanisms, ICANN monthly reports reflect audited accounting transactions between registry operators and ICANN-accredited registrars.
The Two Core Reports
Each month, approximately three months in arrears, ICANN publishes these submissions in CSV format.
1. The Registry Activity Report
The activity report details commercial registrar transactions for the reporting month. It contains one row per ICANN-accredited registrar that had transactions or active domains in the registry. Crucial fields include:
- Total Active Domains: The exact number of registered domains in the registry credited to each registrar as of the final second of the calendar month.
- Net Adds: Successful new domain registrations categorized by contractual term length (one year, two years, up to ten years).
- Net Renews: Explicit renewals requested by registrants, also categorized by term length.
- Transfers Gaining and Losing: Inter-registrar domain migrations successfully finalized under the Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy.
- Deleted Domains (Grace Period): Domains registered and deleted within the standard five-day Add Grace Period (AGP) for a full refund.
- Deleted Domains (Outside Grace Period): Domains purged after expiration or redemption.
- Restores: Domains rescued from the Redemption Grace Period (RGP) following an accidental or lapsed deletion.
2. The Registry Transactions Report
The transactions report captures operational system performance and query volume across the registry infrastructure:
- Total Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) commands processed by the Shared Registration System (SRS).
- Total DNS queries handled across the registry global unicast nameserver cloud (UDP and TCP).
- Total WHOIS and Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) lookup queries answered.
Historical Schema Evolution
When reading historical reports from the early 2000s to the present day, analysts encounter multiple schema shifts. Legacy gTLD reports from Verisign (.com, .net) and Public Interest Registry (.org) historically bundled terms together or used distinct header naming conventions such as “purged-deletes” or “gross-adds”. Modern new gTLD reports standardized on explicit multi-year column headers like “net-adds-1-yr”.
TLD Registry Monitor parses each file according to its specific historical header fingerprint, validating calculations to ensure strict reproducibility.