dotvitals

The domain registration expires within 7 days

CriticalConfirmedQuick windomain.rdap.expiring-lt-7d

What this check looks for

The registry's expiry date for this domain is less than a week away. If the automatic renewal does not go through, the domain starts down the deletion path and the site and email stop working.

Why it matters

Inside a week there is no margin left. A declined card, a lapsed account or a registrar that needs manual confirmation now turns into an outage that takes the whole domain with it — and every recovery route from that point is slower and more expensive than renewing today.

When the check passes, your report says: “Renewal is more than a week away”.

What it costs your score

When this check fails it removes 70 points from your Domain registration score, before the status, confidence and repeat multipliers are applied. Domain registration carries a weight of 5 in the overall score.

It shares the domain.expiry family ceiling of 90 points: however many findings that family produces, together they cannot remove more than that from Domain registration. One underlying problem showing up in several places is still one problem.

Severity
critical
Default confidence
confirmed
Status when triggered
fail
Deduction
70 points
Family cap
domain.expiry · 90
Category
Domain registration
Module
Domain rdap
Fix owned by
registrar
In the ruleset since
2026.09

How the whole score is calculated

How to fix it

Confirm the renewal will go through, or renew manually today.

Inside a week there is no time left to discover that auto-renew was off or the card had expired.

  1. Log in to the registrar named in this report and check that auto-renew is enabled for this specific domain — it is a per-domain setting at most registrars, not an account-wide one.

  2. Check the payment method on file has not expired.

  3. If either is wrong, renew manually now and fix the setting afterwards. Renewing early is not wasted: registries add the new term to the existing expiry date rather than replacing it.

  4. Consider renewing for several years at once. It removes this deadline entirely and is usually cheaper per year.

How to confirm it worked

  • Re-run this scan after the renewal and confirm the expiry date has moved out by a full term.

A named slot like ‹domain› — and the braces left in the configuration below — is filled in with your own values when this rule appears on a report.

Technical detail

The registry reports an expiration date of ‹expires at› — ‹days until expiry› days away. Registry status codes seen: ‹statuses›.

An expiry date on its own does not mean the domain will be lost: most registrars renew automatically by default, and the registry adds an auto-renew grace period on top. What this date tells you is when that automatic renewal has to succeed — so the thing to confirm is that auto-renew is on and the card on file is current, not that a renewal is overdue.

This is reported as a failure rather than a warning only inside seven days, because that is the point at which confirming auto-renew stops being routine housekeeping.

Standards and references

Test this on your domain

Run the check that produces this finding, on its own, against any domain.

Open the domain rdap checker

Other domain rdap checks