2025 fee schedule Archives

New Year, New Fees: PTO Issues 2025 Fee Schedule

The US Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) issued its final rule setting and adjusting patent fees that will take effect on January 19, 2025. 89 Fed. Reg. 91898 (Nov. 20, 2024).

The final rule sets or adjusts 433 patent fees for undiscounted, small, and micro entities, including the introduction of 52 new fees. The fee adjustments are grouped into three categories:

Across-the-board adjustment to patent fees.
Adjustment to front-end fees.
Targeted fees.

Fees not covered by the targeted adjustments will increase by approximately 7.5%. Front-end fees to obtain a patent (i.e., filing, search, examination, and issue fees) are set to increase by an additional 2.5% on top of the 7.5% across-the-board adjustment. Targeted adjustments include increasing fees related to continuing applications, design patent applications, filing excess claims, extensions of time for provisional applications, information disclosure statement sizes, patent term adjustments, patent term extensions, requests for continued examinations, suspension of actions, terminal disclaimers, unintentional delay petitions, and Requests for Director Review of a Patent Trial & Appeal Board decision.

More information, including the new fee schedule, is available on the PTO’s website.

Trademark Fee Increases: The TEAS Party Is Over

After a lengthy public comment and review process, the US Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) announced trademark fee increases effective January 18, 2025. The goal of PTO fee setting is to provide sufficient financial resources to facilitate the effective administration of the US intellectual property system. The PTO aspires to recover aggregate costs to:

Finance the PTO’s mission, strategic goals, and priorities.
Enable financial sustainability.
Promote efficient operations and filing behaviors.
Align fees with the costs of services provided.
Encourage access to the trademark system for all stakeholders.

The fees for filing a new trademark application via either the Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS) or TEAS Plus will remain unchanged: $350 per class for a TEAS standard application and $250 per class for a TEAS Plus application for as long as TEAS remains available (and then using the Beta site discussed below). However, the PTO will institute surcharges for applications that are incomplete or contain custom identifications of goods or services. These application surcharges are intended to encourage more complete applications, which will improve examination efficiency and help reduce pendency.

Description Surcharge Insufficient information (Sections 1 and 44), per class $100 Using the free-form text box instead of the Trademark ID Manual within the Trademark Center to identify goods and services (Sections 1 and 44), per class $200 Each additional group of 1,000 characters in the free-form text box beyond the first 1,000 (Sections 1 and 44), per affected class $200

Since the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is currently unable to collect surcharges, the PTO will raise the fee for WIPO Madrid Trademark Applications to $600 per class.

The PTO will also raise the fees for post-registration filings to offset higher processing costs for these filings and continue balancing the cost of base applications.

Filing Current Fee Fee as of January 18, 2025 Section 9 registration renewal application, per class $300 $325 Section 8 declaration, per class $225 $325 Section 15 declaration, per class $200 $250 Section 71 declaration, per class $225 $325

The PTO has not increased the filing fees in connection with intent to use filings since 2002, although the time to examine such filings has increased exponentially because of the need to examine questionable specimens. Those fees are now set to increase as follows:

Description Current Fee Fee as of January 18, 2025 Amendment to allege use (AAU), per class $100 $150 Statement of use (SOU), per class $100 $150

The fees for requesting an extension of time are unchanged.

Finally, the number of petitions and protests have increased. The PTO will attempt to recover more of the cost of processing petitions and protests as follows:

Description Current Fee Fee as of January 18, 2025 Petition to the Director $250 $400 Petition to revive an application $150 $250 Letter of protest $50 $150

For further details, including a complete list of the fee increases, click here.

The PTO also announced that as of January 18, 2025, filers [...]

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