What Is SOA Record?

Why It Matters

Every DNS zone has exactly one SOA record. It’s the authoritative starting point that tells other DNS servers how to handle the zone — how often to check for updates, when cached data expires, and who’s responsible for the domain.

For domain forwarding, SOA records are transparent — you never need to touch them. They’re maintained automatically by your nameserver provider.

How It Works

A SOA record looks like this:

example.com  SOA  ns1.namecheap.com  admin.example.com  (
    2026042001   ; serial number
    3600         ; refresh (1 hour)
    900          ; retry (15 minutes)
    1209600      ; expire (2 weeks)
    300          ; minimum TTL (5 minutes)
)

The serial number increments every time a DNS change is made. Secondary nameservers compare serial numbers to know when to pull updated records.

SOA and Domain Forwarding

SOA records live at the apex domain level — the same level where CNAME records are restricted. This is one reason why Domain Forward uses A records (not CNAMEs) at the apex: SOA, NS, and A records can coexist on the same name, but CNAMEs cannot share a name with any other record type. See ALIAS records for the workaround.