Enter Austria market with a .CO.AT Domain

Anyone. The registry's eligibility rule is shared across all three zones: any individual or legal entity may register, whatever their nationality, place of residence or field of activity. The «co» in front is not a commercial capacity you must hold — you can take the name without a company and without an Austrian address. No documents, local representative or trustee are required. The one thing the registry asks for is accurate data: a private holder is entered with full first and last name, a company with its full name and legal form, and a PO box does not count as an address. Allocation is purely first come, first served, with no reservation procedure and no waiting list.

One character. The guidelines set the minimum length jointly for .at, .co.at and .or.at and start it at one character, with sixty-three as the maximum. Measurement confirms it: the single-letter a.co.at is registered. The character set is a-z, the digits 0-9 and the hyphen. A name may not begin or end with a hyphen, and it may not carry two hyphens in the third and fourth position together; one- and two-character names may not contain a hyphen at all. Capitals are accepted and folded to lower case. Because short words are still free here more often, that low minimum is a practical advantage.

No rule differs, only the scale. Both zones are run by nic.at under the same terms and conditions and the same registration guidelines, and the guidelines hold no clause specific to .co.at, so eligibility, name rules, the term model and the dispute route are identical. The numbers are what differ: on 15 August 2026 there were 1,487,121 names under .at and 34,132 under .co.at. In practice a word already taken in .at is markedly more likely to be free in .co.at, while you stay with the same registry, the same law and the same whois server.

You pick no number of years. The contract is concluded for an indefinite period: the day and month of your registration become an annually recurring cutoff date, and each service period is invoiced as one year. The name does not fall away because a term expired — you lose it only by cancelling it yourself, or if the invoice goes unpaid despite several reminders. That is also why the registry's whois output carries neither a creation nor an expiry date. Consumers have an extra right: from the second service year onwards, a cancellation in the first six months of a period brings back half of the annual fee paid.

A change of provider runs on the AuthInfo code: you request it from your current provider, and the registry states that the code must be released to you even if old invoices are still open. If the provider digs in, the new one asks the registry for a confirmation token, which is emailed straight to the holder and is valid for 21 days. Because this zone has no term, a transfer neither adds nor costs you days, but it does automatically void a pending cancellation. A change of holder is a separate procedure needing matching declarations from both sides. Start on the domain transfer page.

The domain, the registrar, the name servers, the date of the last change and the DNSSEC status; no creation date and no expiry date are published at all. The holder field depends on the type of person: data of natural persons is withheld and the record shows «data not disclosed», while organisations with legal personality appear with full name and address. Telephone, fax and email can be suppressed on request. Free queries are limited to single names — repeated lookups return «Quota exceeded». Try a record for yourself on the whois search page.

There is no UDRP and no arbitration; the registry refuses to arbitrate, and where the parties cannot agree the route is the ordinary courts. The one instrument on offer is the wait status: whoever makes a legal claim to the name credible, with a company or trade mark register extract, sends a signed letter to the legal department, and a change of holder is blocked for one month, extendable once. Where pending litigation is evidenced, the block lasts as long as the case. One detail matters: the measure does not freeze the name, the domain keeps working, and no priority is given if it is later released.

Yes. The registry accepts applications both through registrars and through its own electronic form, which is where it departs from the generic model of «accredited registrars only». The holder enters into a contract with the registry directly, in addition to the one with the registrar. But nic.at provides no technical service: with a direct registration you must supply working name servers yourself, and a faulty configuration gets the application rejected. The servers are re-checked on every data change, which is why working through a provider that manages DNS is more practical for most people.