How To Transfer a domain from one AWS account to Another

Prerequisites: 

• Access to Route53 and ability to perform domain operations on both AWS accounts. 
• AWS CLI installed on your machine. 

Transfer the domain to another AWS account

First, we need to log in to the account that has the domain currently. Simply run aws configure and provide the credentials if you’re not logged in.

Take note of the receiving account ID where the domain should be transferred to and the domain name itself. 

Run the following command: 

aws route53domains transfer-domain-to-another-aws-account \
 --region us-east-1 --domain-name example.com \ 
 --account-id 123456787899

Leave the region as us-east-1 as it won’t matter.

You will get the Operationid and a Password.

{
    "OperationId": "o12654097-80f0-45ea-b747-77b3b07775d",
    "Password": "*7$Example"
}

Save the response in a file or somewhere to make sure you don’t lose it and log in to the second AWS account where the domain is going to be transferred. You can simply run aws configure and give your IAM user credentials. Your IAM user should have permission to accept the domain name. 

Accept the domain on the receiving account

Login to the receiving AWS account with AWS CLI and run the following:

aws route53domains accept-domain-transfer-from-another-aws-account --region us-east-1 --domain-name example.com --password "*7$Example"

You’ll get the Operationid as a response: 

{
    "OperationId": "27z41bb6-907d-4b11-be4e-e417e291634f"
}

If you want to track the operation you can do that with get-operation-detail command. 

aws route53domains get-operation-detail --region us-east-1 --operation-id 27z41bb6-907d-4b11-be4e-e417e291634f

Output:

{
    "OperationId": "27z41bb6-907d-4b11-be4e-e417e291634f",
    "Status": "SUCCESSFUL",
    "DomainName": "example.com",
    "Type": "INTERNAL_TRANSFER_IN_DOMAIN",
    "SubmittedDate": 1622171617.231
}

Congratulations! You have successfully transferred your domain.

Now you may want to transfer your hosted zones as well. That’s covered in detail on the official documentation here.

Conclusion

Transferring a domain which you may have registered with AWS Route 53 to a different account is simple using AWS CLI. It is important to note that transferring you domain will not transfer your Hosted Zones and records. In addition, please do not delete the hosted zone right away after you move it to the new account as your new nameservers will take up to 24 to 48 hours to be populated globally and you don’t want to cause downtime.