The domain your subcontractor registered is not yours
A domain registered under someone else's account belongs to that account, not to your business. When the person who registered it leaves, your website and email can leave with them.
A subcontractor registers your domain under a personal account, because it is faster than waiting for you to set one up. Six months later that subcontractor moves on, stops answering messages, or closes the account for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Your website goes dark. Your email stops arriving. Nobody hands you a folder marked "here is how to get it back", because there was never a folder to hand over.
This happens more often than most business owners expect. A domain name is not a document you can request a copy of. It is a record held by a registrar, tied to whichever account paid for it and whichever email address confirmed the purchase. If that account belongs to a freelancer, an agency that folded, or a developer who registered it under their own card, the registration belongs to them in every practical sense, whatever your contract might imply.
Who the registrar actually recognises
Registrars do not read your service agreement. They recognise the account holder, the login and the payment method on file. If a dispute arises, you are asking a third party to intervene in an account that was never yours, using evidence that may or may not persuade them. Recovery is possible, but it is slow, and slow is expensive when your website and email are both offline.
A domain held in someone else's account is a business risk sitting quietly until the day it is not.
The fix costs nothing and takes minutes at the start of a project. The domain should be registered in an account your business controls, with your business email as the contact, your payment method on file and your name as the registrant of record. Anyone building the site, whether an employee or a subcontractor, works inside that account rather than owning it.
What to check before work begins
Before any development starts, ask three questions. Who registered the domain. Whose email address and card are attached to it. Who can log into the registrar account today without asking permission. If the answer to any of these is not your business, arrange the transfer before the project goes further, not after launch.
At Yunaristech we register client domains under client accounts as standard practice, because a fixed price project should leave you owning everything it produces, not renting access to it from whoever built it. A marketing site, a web application or a software product is only really yours if the address people use to find it is yours as well. Get that settled early, and the rest of the project can proceed without a quiet risk sitting underneath it.