Patent Attorney and Founder
We’re all paying more in fees, and I really hope it leads to better results. Right now, it takes about nine months, sometimes a little less, from filing a patent to getting that first exam. To me, that’s too long.
On the patent side, the fee jump isn’t huge. It’s the first increase since 2020, so four years isn’t bad. The overall bump is about seven to eight percent. The big shock is the Continuation-in-Part fee. That one jumped by $44,000, which is wild.
My guess? They’re trying to pull more money from large companies that file child applications over and over to keep a patent family alive long after the first one has issued. It hits smaller filers too, though, and that’s the part that stings. A continuation is often how you keep pace with changes in your product or with what your competitors are doing. Now the tool costs much more, even though the work on the examiner’s side hasn’t really changed.
I don’t mind a small increase. Prices rise with time. But that huge jump feels more like a money grab.
Trademarks got hit even harder. That increase is around 40%. The basic filing fee went from $250 to $350, and a bunch of other fees went up, too. I’ve been filing trademarks for more than a decade, and this is the biggest jump I’ve seen. Even so, the U.S. is still cheaper than many places. In the U.K., you’re looking at close to a thousand dollars. In the UAE, it can be $2,500 for a single filing.
Still, I wouldn’t mind the higher fees if they came with better service. Faster exams. Better reviews. Clearer office actions. But if we keep getting the same slow responses, people will be upset. I know I will.
There are a few new trademark fees I actually think make sense. If an application is missing key info, the USPTO can charge a $100 fee for that. Not great, but it pushes people to be more careful. There’s also a new $200 charge for using a free-form description of goods and services. And here’s the part I kind of like: if your free-form text is over 1,000 characters, you pay more. That stops people from dumping the “kitchen sink” into one filing.
Other fees went up too. Post-registration filings cost more. Petitions cost more. A petition to revive a missed deadline went from $150 to $250.
Patents also got new fees. The IDS, where you disclose all prior art, now costs money if you submit a lot. Under 50 references are free. From 50 to 100 costs $200. More than 100 costs $500. So if you bury the examiner with prior art, you pay for it.
There are also new charges for late child filings. If you file a continuation more than six years after the earliest filing, it costs $2,700. More than nine years? It jumps to $4,000. And claim fees doubled if you go past 20 claims. Patent term extensions also went up by more than 100%.
So yes, fees went up across the board. And like you, I hope that means more speed and better work.
A big piece of news: federal workers are being pushed back to the office. Only about six percent are currently in person, which shocked me. Most USPTO examiners, especially on the trademark side, work from home. Will going back to the office help? Hard to say. Some newer examiners seem to need more training, so maybe more supervision could help. But getting thousands of people back into a DC office may be a challenge.
There’s also a shift in leadership. Kathy Vidal stepped down as director late last year, and now we have an acting director again. Changes often follow new leadership, and the new administration has already rolled back some older AI-related rules. That may open the door for more AI-based inventions to get approved with fewer hurdles.
On the trademark side, AI has created new problems, too. People use AI to name brands or design logos. Naming is fine. But ownership of AI-generated art is messy. You can use an AI logo as a trademark because it identifies your business. But you don’t own the copyright. That’s why I tell clients not to rely only on AI when it comes to brand assets. It’s safer to pay a real designer.
There’s so much AI content out there now that it’s easy to imagine a shady company later claiming they “own” an AI-generated design you used. They could even track it. For me, spending a few hundred dollars for human-made work is still the safer path.
That’s the short version of where we are: higher fees, slower exams, lots of changes in DC, and a whole new set of questions around AI. Let’s hope the extra money at least buys us some better service.