Hostinger Refund Policy (October 2026): 30-Day Money-Back, Explained

What does the 30-day money-back guarantee actually cover?

Hostinger’s refund policy is more generous than it first looks, because it covers renewals as well as new purchases — something many hosts quietly exclude. Per Hostinger’s own help-center article on the refund policy (updated about four weeks before we checked it on October 9, 2026), the following can be refunded within 30 days of the original purchase date, as long as you paid with anything other than cryptocurrency:

• Web, cloud, Agency, KVM VPS, and Game Panel hosting — both new purchases and renewals. So if a renewal catches you by surprise in year two, you still have 30 days from the renewal charge to reverse it.
• Hostinger Email and Titan Email — new purchases, renewals, and upgrades.
• Plan upgrades for web, cloud, and Agency hosting — if you upgrade mid-term and regret it, the upgrade itself is refundable within 30 days.

The 30-day clock starts on the transaction date, not the day you first log in or launch your site. Buy on October 1, and day 30 is October 31 — even if you only got around to building the site on October 20. If you are testing Hostinger with the idea that you might cancel, start the clock in your head at checkout, not at launch.

What is NOT refundable?

This is the part most refund guides gloss over, and it is the part that actually determines whether your request succeeds. Hostinger’s policy strictly excludes the following — no 30-day window, no exceptions:

The single most common surprise: domain registrations. People assume the 30-day guarantee covers everything in the cart. It does not. A brand-new .com registration gets only a 96-hour refund window — four days, not thirty — and most country-code domains get no window at all. If you registered a domain on impulse with your hosting order, that part of the purchase has a much shorter fuse.

What happens to the free domain if you refund hosting?

This is the question almost nobody answers clearly, so here is Hostinger’s actual rule, quoted in spirit from the policy: if your refunded hosting plan included a free domain name, the standard price of the domain may be deducted from your total refund amount, and you keep ownership of the domain for the remainder of its billing period.

Walk through what that means with a concrete scenario. You buy a 12-month Premium web hosting plan that includes a free .com for the first year. On day 20 you request a full refund of the hosting. Hostinger refunds the hosting payment minus the standard (non-promo) price of the .com registration, and the domain stays in your account, registered to you, until its year is up. You do not lose the domain — but you do not get its value back in cash either, because the domain itself was never refundable beyond its 96-hour window.

Special cases: domains, VPS cooldowns, Reach, and payment methods

Beyond the headline 30 days, the policy has a handful of special rules that trip people up. All of these come straight from Hostinger’s refund policy article as we read it on October 9, 2026:

• New .com/.net/.org registrations: 96 hours. Four days from registration, then final. This is a registrar constraint, not Hostinger being difficult — registries do not give registrars a 30-day return window either.
• Unsuccessful domain transfers: 96 hours. If the transfer fails and you ask within 96 hours, you get the transfer fee back. Completed transfers are never refundable.
• Brazilian domains (.br.com.br.net.br): 7 days for registrations and transfers — a slightly longer window set by that registry.
• VPS refunds: 180-day cooldown. After Hostinger completes a VPS refund for you, you cannot get another VPS refund until 180 days have passed. This is an anti-abuse measure — it stops people from cycling free months on servers.
• Hostinger Reach: 30 days plus conditions. Reach plans are refundable within 30 days, but only if at least 180 days have passed since your last Reach refund, and if you upgraded from the free Reach plan, only the first renewal after upgrading is refundable.
• AI credits are deducted, not refunded. If you bought LLM credits (for example for the AI automation app), their value comes out of any refund amount.
• Multibanco and GCash payments cannot go back to the original bank account — they are refundable only to your Hostinger Balance. Some payment methods simply do not support direct refunds, in which case Hostinger arranges an alternative with you.
• Cryptocurrency: never. Paid in crypto and changed your mind? There is no refund path. This alone is a reason to pay by card if you think you might cancel.

How to request a refund in hPanel, step by step

You do not need to contact support to get a standard refund — Hostinger built the whole flow into hPanel. The steps below follow Hostinger’s help-center guide “How to get a refund at Hostinger” (updated within a day of our October 9, 2026 check):

1. Download everything first. This is step zero and it is the most important one. The moment you submit, your services are canceled and your files, databases, and emails are deleted permanently. Grab file and database backups, export your emails, and if your site was built with Hostinger’s AI Builder — whose content cannot be downloaded the normal way — manually save your text, images, and product listings, or export the content to WordPress first.
2. Find your Payment ID. In your Hostinger dashboard, open the paid-invoices page, which lists every Payment ID from the last 30 days. Match the Payment ID to the right invoice, date, product, and amount — click the downward arrow to inspect the details when one payment covers several services.
3. Click the Refund button — if it is there. An eligible Payment ID shows a Refund button. If the button is missing, the payment is not eligible under the policy — do not assume it is a display glitch. This is also where you can disable auto-renewal instead, if you simply want the service to expire without renewing.
4. Confirm what gets canceled. Review the list of refundable services on that invoice, tick the checkbox confirming you understand the data will be permanently lost, and click Next.
5. Pick a reason, then pick where the money goes. Select your refund reason, then choose the destination: your Hostinger Balance or the original payment method. (Invoices originally paid with Hostinger credits can only go back to Balance, and only once per 12 months per invoice.)
6. Submit and watch your inbox. Review the summary and click Submit request. You will get an email confirmation, and you can track the status any time under Billing → Refund History in hPanel.

How long does the refund take?

After the email confirmation, Hostinger says the money arrives in a few hours up to a few days, depending on the payment method you used. Card refunds have to travel through the card networks, so “a few days” is normal — PayPal and similar wallets tend to be faster. Refunds to your Hostinger Balance are the quickest of all, since the money never leaves Hostinger’s system; once a Balance refund is processed it is final and cannot be moved to a different payment source.

One honest caveat: “a few days” is Hostinger’s side of the timeline. Your bank can add its own processing on top, especially for international cards. If a week has passed with no sign of the money and Refund History shows it completed, that is a question for your bank, not Hostinger.

Read this before you click refund

Three warnings that deserve their own section, because each one has bitten real users:

• The request is not reversible. There is no “undo” and no grace period. Files, databases, emails, and configuration are gone the instant you submit. If you change your mind five minutes later, you are buying a new service and restoring from the backups you (hopefully) took in step one.
• AI Builder sites need manual rescue. Standard backup downloads do not work for sites built with Hostinger’s AI Website Builder. Copy out your text and images by hand, or use the export-to-WordPress option, before you start the refund flow.
• Partial invoices get complicated. If one payment covered hosting plus a domain plus an add-on, only the eligible line items come back. Review the itemized breakdown on the confirmation screen — do not assume the headline total is what you will receive.

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