Domain and record naming

When choosing the name of any DNS record or sub-domain, organisations must adhere to the NHS England Domain and Record Naming standards and guidance.

The proposed name must be available.

The NHS England DNS Team can advise if a proposed name is available. Not all allocated names can be queried in DNS. This is because some names are reserved, but not created in DNS until needed.

Your proposed name must clearly describe your organisation or the NHS service you’re providing. Think about users of the name and make sure the name is not too long or complicated.

Your proposed name must:

• be between 3 and 63 characters long
• contain only alphanumeric characters (0-9 and a-z) and the ‘-‘ (dash) symbol
• not be the same or substantially similar to an existing .nhs.uk domain name
• not use ‘&’ (ampersands) or ‘_’ (underscores)
• not include abbreviations like ltd, plc or gov
• not include a postcode

You could use the full name of your organisation, NHS service or an appropriate suffix. For GP surgeries, domain names should reflect the official name of the surgery.

‘*’ or wildcard names should not be used anywhere.

If appropriate, your proposed name should be relevant to the geographic area served by your organisation or the NHS service you’re providing.

You might wish to avoid components of your names that are subject to machinery of government  changes. This allows an organisation to potentially continue using a name when a structural change is made by the government.

For example, names suffixed with 'pct' (for primary care trust) were made defunct by the 2013 move to clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), leaving 1071 defunct 'pct' DNS Domains requiring migration to new domains and removal. This issue creates unnecessary additional work in migration of email and web services and clean-up of the DNS database.

If you apply for a generic word or combination of generic words for a nhs.uk name, the NHS England DNS Team will consider it on its merits. Central NHS or government organisations may have a claim on generic words used as names, and may claim them without reference to the current user. For example: deepcleaning.nhs.uk.

The NHS England DNS Team recommend that you make use of generic words as sub-domains of your domain name. For example: flujab.imperial.nhs.uk.

Your proposed name must be unique. If your proposed name is substantially the same as another nhs.uk name, you must choose another name.

Where the proposed name relates to sub-domain of nhs.uk, or a record in the apex domain, the name must be unique across the whole of the NHS.

Where the proposed name is a resource record in a sub-domain, the name need be unique only within that sub-domain.

The NHS England DNS Team can advise if a proposed name is available.

If you use an acronym, initialism, or abbreviation, it must be descriptive, unique and clear to avoid user confusion. You can use commonly-used abbreviations and abbreviations that are well-known to your users.

A domain name must not contain only acronyms, these are not descriptive to users, particularly users from outside of a geographical area where they may be better known.

The NHS England DNS team reserves the right to remove without notice, any DNS zones and associated DNS records on the nhs.uk Nameservers (NS) if it feels that the domain name in question is contravening any of our standards, or poses a security or safety risk. For further information refer to Guidance for Domain Name administrators and technical contacts, and for advice, contact [email protected].