Whois Field Reference

About this calculator

A WHOIS record is the public registration data attached to a domain name, returned in response to a WHOIS query (port 43) or a registrar's web-based lookup. Fields like Creation Date, Registry Expiry Date, Registrar, Domain Status (e.g. clientTransferProhibited, pendingDelete) and Name Server follow the format defined by ICANN's Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) and the older RFC 3912 WHOIS protocol, though exact field names vary slightly by registry (Verisign for .com/.net, individual ccTLD registries for country codes).

This reference explains what each field actually represents — for example, that a “pendingDelete” status means the domain is in its final redemption window before release, or that “Registrar WHOIS Server” points to the authoritative source rather than a cached copy. Domain registrars, network administrators, security researchers and sysadmins investigating phishing domains, planning a domain transfer, or auditing expiration dates rely on this kind of field-by-field breakdown instead of guessing from raw, inconsistently formatted WHOIS output.