Less than a month is left until the European Union’s country code top-level domain, .EU, will mark its 20th anniversary. The two-letter country code “EU” was assigned to the European Union back in 1999, and in 2000 the European Council approved the creation of a unified domain for EU member states. On April 7, 2006, the EURid registry opened registrations in the .EU domain zone. This date is considered the domain’s official birthday.
Ahead of the .EU’s anniversary, Domain Gang has published a brief overview of its history. The launch of the domain was more than impressive, with more than one million domain names registered over the first 24 hours alone. This remarkable result clearly reflected the enormous interest in a unified European digital identity. Registrars, investors, government agencies, and private businesses rushed to secure domain names, and by mid-2007 the total number of active registrations had reached approximately 2.6 million.
Today, 20 years later, it can be noted that the .EU domain has not entirely lived up to the high expectations generated by its extremely successful launch. The initial speculative surge in popularity in 2006 and early 2007 was followed by a wave of non-renewals, which significantly reduced the active base. After that, the number of registrations gradually recovered and continued to grow over the following decade, although at a relatively modest pace. The highest recorded number of .EU registrations was apparently reached in late 2025, when the EURid registry reported 3,790,453 registered domain names.
Currently, according to the EURid’s online counter, approximately 3,730,486 domain names are registered in the zone, including the internationalized Cyrillic (.ею) and Greek (.ευ) versions. Admittedly, for the unified domain of a political and economic bloc with a population of more than 400 million people, these figures may appear somewhat modest compared to initial expectations. Nevertheless, the .EU domain has clearly demonstrated its viability and significance. It has become not only a reliable digital identifier for companies, organizations, and individuals across EU member states, but also a stable and integral part of the global domain name system.
