Buy .pk Domain Name

No. The registry policy says so in terms: the registrant is not required to have any local presence, and the administrative contact need not be located in Pakistan. A company registered in Türkiye, a sole trader and a private individual all apply on identical terms, with no local address, agent or trustee involved. Registration from abroad is built into the registry's commercial structure as well — the fee schedule defines separate tariffs for holders based in Pakistan and for holders or registrars based outside it, so a foreign customer is a normal class rather than an exception. No documents are needed for the registration itself; paperwork applies only to the educational and government namespaces.

In two-year blocks. The policy states that the maintenance fee is collected in advance every two years, and the registry's own FAQ adds the ceiling: at most ten years may be paid at once. In practice that means there is no one-year, three-year, five-year or seven-year .pk registration — the term moves in two, four and six. You can see it in the registry's own records: for every name checked, the gap between the creation date and the expiry date comes out as an even number of years. Gaps longer than ten years are not a breach of the ceiling but successive renewals stacking up.

Three groups of rules. The first is form: a name may not begin with a hyphen and may not contain two consecutive hyphens, because that sequence is reserved for international script encoding. The second is the anti-phishing pattern ban: a .pk name may not end with one of the registry's own suffixes, and in short names those strings may not appear inside the label either. The third is discretion — the registry may refuse names it judges abusive or hateful, and keeps an updated word list for the purpose. The scrutiny is of the name itself: the registry states plainly that if the name is not questionable it will not examine the website's content.

You get two weeks. If payment has not arrived by the due date the registry de-activates the name, and throughout those two weeks only the previous holder may pay and re-activate it. At the end of the period the name is offered to third parties on a pre-paid, first come first served basis. The thirty-day grace plus redemption chain familiar from generic extensions does not exist in this zone, so a delay of much more than a fortnight loses the name for good. The registry tries to send a reminder beforehand but treats it as a courtesy and does not accept a missed email as an excuse for late payment.

There are two separate operations and both run on paper. For a change of account or registrar, companies must supply an authorisation letter from a director on official letterhead, signed and stamped, while individuals supply a properly sworn affidavit. The registry does not accept scans and requires the originals to be sent by post to Lahore; the documents are then verified by telephone, the process takes a few business days after verification, and an expired name cannot be transferred at all. For registrars based outside Pakistan the registry notes that a transfer using an authorisation code may also be available, but leaves that to its own discretion. Start on the domain transfer page.

Today, no. The registry's lookup screen gives its own reason: because of data protection rules the public disclosure of user information has been limited, and to see your own record you must sign in to your registry account or write to the registry. Measurement bears that out — a query returns only the domain name, its status, the creation and expiry dates and the name servers, with no holder field printed at all. One point deserves attention: the registry's written policy still treats registration data as public, so the text lags behind actual practice. You can check a name on the whois search page.

No. The registry writes that two consecutive hyphens are reserved for international script encoding, but it has never opened that encoding for registration; in testing, both a name written in punycode form and a name written directly in non-Latin characters were rejected. Urdu-script names belong to a different zone in Pakistan: the Perso-Arabic country extension is a separate delegation and is run not by PKNIC but by the National Telecommunication Corporation. On the PKNIC side, Urdu domain names remain an item on the policy board's agenda. Your .pk name therefore has to be built from Latin letters, digits and hyphens.

Both sit with the same registry under the same policy text, and technically they are even served from a single zone; the difference is the level and the naming rules. .pk is registered directly at the second level, which buys you a shorter and more striking address but brings the two anti-phishing pattern bans with it. .com.pk is the third-level space the registry describes as being for «general business, or individual», and those pattern bans do not apply there. Neither locks the other: holding a name at one level does not close it at the other, so covering your brand in Pakistan means taking both.