.eu trustee and local-presence services compared

The pick is united-domains: a large, fully identified German registrar that gives you a written .eu trustee contract to sign before anything is registered, publishes the domain price, and charges nothing for the owner change or the transfer you will need on the way out. That last point decides more .eu trustee arrangements than any annual fee, because leaving one always means a change of registrant. PTS Trustee is the only firm here that names the legal entity holding your domain and publishes its own terms, and it loses on lock-in rather than honesty. Everything below those two is priced in an order form, contracted by email, or both.

Before any of it, check whether you need a trustee at all. If you hold the citizenship of any EU member state, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway, you can register a .eu in your own name from anywhere in the world, and none of this page applies to you. See who can register a .eu domain.

The eleven services compared

"Trustee named" asks whether the provider tells you, before you pay, which legal entity will appear in the registry as the holder of your domain. Two of eleven do. Ratings weigh that disclosure, the published contract and the cost of leaving ahead of price. None of these services are affiliated with EURid, and EURid does not licence, approve or supervise any of them. Each links to its full profile in the provider directory, and the methodology explains where the figures come from.

The clause none of them quote

EURid's Terms and Conditions, version 13.0 of 13 October 2022, are the contract every .eu holder signs. Section 3(b) reads:

Keep your registration data accurate, complete and up-to-date at all times. Your registration data must be your own data and must not be that of your Registrar, or of a proxy holder or a representative of a natural person or legal entity who does not meet the eligibility criteria. [...] Inaccurate registration data shall constitute breach of these Terms and Conditions and grounds for Revocation of your Domain Name.

A trustee arrangement is a proxy holder standing in for a party that does not meet the eligibility criteria. That is the definition of the product, and the clause names it. Section 4(d) then lists failure to fulfil the eligibility criteria as a ground on which EURid may revoke the domain, after notifying the holder by email and giving an opportunity to remedy where remedy is possible.

What follows from that in practice is a matter of judgement, so here it is stated plainly. EURid has not run a campaign against trustee-held .eu domains, and many are registered and renewing normally. The exposure is not that the registry is hunting for you. It is that if the arrangement is ever examined, in a dispute, a data verification request or a complaint from someone who wants your name, the registry's own terms already describe the position you are in and already provide the remedy. On .no the trustee model sits in silence in the policy. On .eu it does not.

Why .eu is different

On .de anyone in the world can be the registrant, and a local-presence service only lends an address for service of documents. On .eu there is no equivalent. Article 3 of Regulation (EU) 2019/517, restated as section 3(a) of the Terms and Conditions, tests the holder itself: a citizen of the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway anywhere in the world, a natural person resident in that area, or an undertaking or organisation established in it. There is no admin-contact route and no address-only workaround. If you are not eligible, someone else has to be the registrant.

That is why the .eu products sold as trustee services all work the same way underneath, whatever the marketing calls them. CentralNic Reseller puts it more bluntly than anyone: for a customer who is not an EU citizen, the third party provider is the actual owner of the domain name with all attached rights. united-domains says the registration runs through its trustee, who acts as the owner. PTS describes fiduciary administration or holdership. Those are three descriptions of one thing.

Who will not sell you one

The absences are as informative as the offers. Three established registrars that run trustee services for other restricted domains leave .eu off the list. Netim publishes a trustee page covering more than forty ccTLDs, with a price against each, and .eu is not among them. Openprovider lists a dozen countries including France, and not .eu. Gandi's list runs past thirty extensions, and not .eu. A fourth, TransIP, sells trustee add-ons for .de, .fr and .it at published prices and offers nothing for .eu. Registrars that publish a trustee price list tend to leave .eu off it, which is worth weighing against the ones that do not.

What you are buying

You are buying a contract with a company, and that company owns your domain. The distinction the industry draws, between registered ownership and beneficial ownership, is real, and it is worth understanding exactly how much of it survives contact with EURid.

• The registry recognises one party. EURid's definitions section defines the Domain Name Holder as the person or entity that registered the name via a registrar. There is no beneficial owner in the registry's model, no field for one, and no procedure that consults one. Your claim is against your provider, under your contract, in your provider's courts, and nowhere else.
• Leaving requires a change of holder. Section 2 lets you transfer to another registrar or to a new holder who meets the eligibility criteria. Moving a domain out of a trustee is the second of those, not the first, and it needs the trustee to act. This is why the owner-change fee, not the annual fee, is the number to compare.
• You cannot leave to yourself unless you qualify. The new holder must meet the criteria too. If nothing about your situation changes, the exit you are buying is an exit to a different trustee.
• Non-payment ends the arrangement, not the ownership. Section 5 makes you liable to your registrar and holds EURid harmless for anything the registrar fails to do, deletion and revocation included. If the trustee stops paying, the domain goes, and the registry's position is that this is between you and the registrar.
• A dispute freezes the name. Section 6 puts a domain On Hold on notification of an ADR or court proceeding, which blocks transfer to a new holder or another registrar and blocks changes to the registration data until it ends. A dispute is exactly when you would want to move.

A user certificate, an ownership certificate or a signed trustee agreement are all worth having, and none of them are registry instruments. They are evidence for a claim against your provider. That makes the provider's solvency, jurisdiction and willingness to be named the substance of what you are buying.

The services in detail

united-domains ★★★★★★★★★★

A German retail registrar owned by United Internet, and the largest identifiable counterparty on this page. The .eu trustee route runs on a separate written agreement, the .eu Trustee Contract, which you complete before the trustee is applied to your portfolio. The company states without hedging that the registration is made through its trustee, who acts as the owner, and that you receive full rights of use. The .eu domain itself is €5 including VAT in the first year and €29 a year after, and the published price list carries no setup fee, no transfer fee and no owner-change fee.

That last item is the reason it wins. On .eu, leaving a trustee is an owner change, and an owner change is where competitors bill you. The weaknesses are real: the trustee entity is not named before you sign, the trustee service is not priced as a separate line so you cannot compare it directly, and the .eu trustee material is published in German only. If what you want is a large, solvent, addressable German company on the other side of the contract, this is it. Full profile.

PTS Trustee ★★★★★★★★★★

The only dedicated trustee firm here rather than a registrar with a sideline. PTS Privacy & Trustee Services GmbH publishes a complete imprint: Neunkircher Straße 43, 66299 Friedrichsthal, Amtsgericht Saarbrücken HRB 100445, a named managing director and a VAT number. It covers .de, .eu, .fr and .it, its lawyers act as the trustee, and its own terms describe the .eu service accurately as fiduciary administration or holdership for customers who cannot meet the registry's requirements. On disclosure it is the best on this page.

The terms are also where the problems are, and they are worth reading in full. You cannot buy from PTS. Clause 5(a) puts pricing entirely in the hands of a partner registrar, and clause 2(c) says the list of partner registrars is available on request, so the fee is unknowable until you find the reseller. Clause 6(b) makes the contract inseparable from the domain staying at that registrar. Clause 6(d) lets PTS forbid a transfer to any registrar that is not a partner unless PTS has already been removed from the public record. Clause 6(c) allows termination for cause once payment to the partner registrar is more than twenty calendar days late, and states that in those cases all rights of the customer lapse. Clause 9(b) excludes assignment of your rights. Honest about what it is, and built to keep you where you are. Full profile.

CentralNic Reseller ★★★★★★★★★★

The wholesale platform behind Key-Systems, RRPproxy and Hexonet, part of Team Internet Group. Its .eu knowledge-base entry contains the single most useful sentence any of these providers has written: for a customer who is not an EU citizen, the third party provider is the actual owner of the domain name with all attached rights. No user certificate, no softening, no beneficial-ownership language. If you want to know what you are buying, buy from the company willing to write it down.

Against that: the third party is not named, the price is wholesale and reached through a reseller rather than a retail page, and no exit or owner-change terms are published. It is a sound platform sold through intermediaries, which means the contract you get is the reseller's and needs reading on its own terms. Full profile.

DomainRegister International ★★★★★★★★★★

A small Italian operation trading as DomainRegister International, and the only provider on this page that publishes a .eu-specific trustee agreement clause by clause in its knowledge base, where anyone can read it before buying. It names the trustee, Persolvo d.o.o., a Slovenian company, and the agreement is governed exclusively by Slovenian law. For transparency of structure that is second only to PTS, and ahead of every larger name here.

Read what the agreement says, though, because publishing it does not make it generous. Annual registration and trustee fees are payable in advance and there is no claim to partial reimbursement if the domain is cancelled or transferred early. The trustee may cancel the domain without warning if it judges the content to breach EU law, terminating the agreement immediately. You must answer enquiries within 24 hours. If a third party challenges the name and you want it defended, you have two days to lodge a security deposit and appoint counsel. Liability is limited to gross negligence, and you indemnify the trustee against everything else. Neither the .eu price nor the trustee fee is published anywhere on the site. Full profile.

INWX ★★★★★★★★★★

The German registrar we pick for .de, and a good company, running one of the widest trustee lists anywhere: around sixty extensions across five continents, with .eu and its Cyrillic and Greek variants included. Many entries are marked free, .eu is not, and the fee is quoted case by case according to the work involved rather than published.

The reason it scores lower here than on .de is its own description of the mechanism, which is the same sentence for every extension on the list: it registers the domain in your name, but with INWX's data or that of a local partner. On .de that is exactly right and it is why INWX wins there. On .eu it runs into section 3(b) at its sharpest, because the first thing that clause forbids is registration data that is your registrar's. Either the .eu arrangement uses a local partner rather than INWX itself, in which case the buyer is not told who, or it does not, in which case the record is the one EURid's terms name first. A .eu-specific explanation and a published fee would move this rating a long way. Full profile.

101domain ★★★★★★★★★★

A large ccTLD specialist covering trustee service in nearly sixty countries, .eu included. Its general trustee page states that no contract is required, that you keep full control and management through your 101domain account, and that the service is removed by raising a support ticket once you can meet the requirement yourself. For most restricted domains that is a fair description.

For .eu it does not fit. The same page says the public record will show the local administrative contact associated with the trustee service. EURid does not test an administrative contact; it tests the holder, and on a trustee-held .eu the holder is the trustee. Either the description is generic boilerplate applied to a domain it does not describe, or the .eu arrangement differs from what the page says, and neither is reassuring. The trustee fee is not published and surfaces only once you begin an order, which rules out comparison before checkout. Full profile.

InterNetX ★★★★★★★★★★

A long-established German registrar and the platform behind AutoDNS. It publishes a trustee list of around thirty extensions and .eu is not on it, alongside a note that where the trustee has to be registered as owner or registrant, as for .eu, change-owner fees may apply. Read together, that is a company telling you it can arrange .eu but has not turned it into a product.

The candour is worth something and the counterparty is substantial. The practical problem is that nothing is knowable in advance: no trustee fee, no domain price outside the platform, no figure for the change-owner fee that will land on you when you leave, and no named trustee. For a wholesale customer already inside AutoDNS that may be workable. For anyone else there is nothing here to compare. Full profile.

EuropeID ★★★★★★★★★★

Danish, and one of two sites run by the same operation. It does publish .eu prices, €69 for the first year and €59 on renewal with the local presence service included at no extra cost, and it does publish local presence terms, which is more than most manage. It also offers a signed user certificate recording your rights.

The terms are the reason for the rating. EuropeID, its local branch or an agent it appoints becomes the legal holder and administrative contact. It must remain the registrar of record. It reserves the right to revise address data or transfer ownership at its own discretion and without notice. Prepaid annual fees are not refunded. Gambling, chat, adult and advertising domains need pre-approval. The holding entity is never named. A discretionary power to move ownership without notice, held by an unnamed entity, at roughly four times the ordinary .eu price, is a poor combination whatever the certificate says. Full profile.

Web Solutions ★★★★★★★★★★

The same business as EuropeID on a second site at a second price: $70 a year for .eu, registration and renewal alike, with the trustee included. The eligibility summary is accurate and it will send a draft user certificate on request. Everything else, the trustee terms, the identity of the holder and the exit process, is available only by contacting support, so a buyer comparing before purchase sees a price and nothing else. Rated alongside EuropeID because it is the same operation, and the same discretionary powers apply. Full profile.

Marcaria ★★★★★★★★★★

A Miami brand-protection and domain firm, ICANN accredited, covering more than 200 countries. It offers local presence across the restricted European domains and will issue a certificate of ownership on request, and it is a real company with a filed corporate record.

Two things pull it down. Customers have reported a $20 owner-update fee charged when transferring a trustee-held domain out, applied across .eu, .de, .it, .es and .fr, which is a charge levied precisely at the moment you leave, on the step .eu forces you to take. And the group's EU-facing entity, Marcaria.com EU Limited, is a company registered in London, England. A UK company has not satisfied the .eu eligibility criteria since Brexit, which makes the naming at best confusing on the one point that matters here. Neither the trustee fee nor the identity of the eligible holder is published. Full profile.

Intername ★★★★★★★★★★

The cheapest offer found anywhere: £6 to register a .eu, £8 to renew, and a local agent service at £2 a year. The site has been trading since 2008 by its own copyright line and says it has been registering .eu domains for eighteen years.

It publishes no operating company, no registered address and no company number, on the .eu page, in the site footer or anywhere else we could find. There are no local agent terms, no statement of who becomes the registrant, and no exit process. For £2 a year you are asking an unidentified party to become the legal holder of your domain, in a registry whose terms make the holder's identity the whole question. The price is not the problem. The absence of a counterparty is. Full profile.

How to choose

1. Check your own eligibility first. Citizenship of any member state, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, qualifies you anywhere in the world. A great many people buying .eu trustee services do not need one.
2. Ask which legal entity will be the holder, in writing, before you pay. Name, country and company number. Two of the eleven answer this without being asked. A provider that will not answer it at all is telling you something.
3. Price the owner change, not the annual fee. Leaving a .eu trustee is a change of holder. Get the figure for that in writing, because it is where the money is.
4. Read the transfer clause for a veto. PTS can block a move to a non-partner registrar; EuropeID must stay the registrar of record. Both are ordinary commercial terms, and both mean you cannot simply leave.
5. Ask what happens if you become eligible. The good answer is a free transfer of the registration into your own name. Get it in the contract, not the sales email.
6. Ask about wind-down. If the trustee stops trading, what happens to a domain held in its name? Almost nobody answers this, and it is the largest risk in the model.
7. Run your own DNS. Point the domain at nameservers you control, so a billing dispute is never an outage.
8. Keep your own renewal calendar. Section 5 of EURid's terms makes the registrar's failure your problem, not the registry's.

Alternatives

Use your citizenship. The strongest route, and free. A citizen of any EU member state, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway may register a .eu from any address on earth. If anyone in your business holds one of those passports, the problem is solved without a contract. See the .eu eligibility rules.

Use an EU or EEA group company. If you already have a subsidiary, branch or associated entity established in the area, it can be the registrant with its own data. This is the arrangement EURid's terms are written to accommodate, and the only one where the registered holder and the people controlling the domain sit inside the same organisation.

Establish an entity. Setting up a small company in an EU member state is more work than a trustee and removes the problem for good, and it does more than one job if you are trading in Europe anyway.

Use a different domain. The unfashionable answer, and often the right one. .eu carries no ranking advantage that a .com or a national domain you can hold outright does not, and a name you own is worth more than a name you rent through a company you cannot identify.

Frequently asked questions

Notes

Prices checked September 2026 as published by each provider, and several of these pages are years out of date, so confirm at checkout. united-domains' €5 first year and €29 renewal are retail prices including 19% German VAT, and the trustee service is not priced as a separate line. EuropeID lists €69 and €59, and Web Solutions $70, for what appears to be the same service from the same operation. Intername's £6, £8 and £2 are as listed, before tax. INWX, 101domain, InterNetX, Marcaria, CentralNic Reseller, PTS and DomainRegister International do not publish a .eu trustee fee at all. The $20 Marcaria owner-update charge is a customer report on a public domain forum, not a published tariff, and is described as such.

Quotations from EURid's Terms and Conditions are from version 13.0 dated 13 October 2022, the version in force at the time of writing. Provider terms are quoted or summarised from each company's own published pages. Company details for PTS GmbH are from its own imprint, and for Marcaria.com EU Limited from the UK register of companies. This page describes how .eu registration works and how these services present themselves. It is not legal advice, and the reading of section 3(b) above is ours. A trustee arrangement is a contract, and if the domain matters to your business it is worth having a lawyer read it.

Last updated September 2026. Prices and terms change, and several of these providers publish out-of-date pages. If you spot something wrong, email info@trusteeindex.com.