Congratulations! The Patent Office Wants More of Your Money! Episode 149

(This episode is with costs related to 2025 patent fees. These fees may have changed by the time you read this.)

Fee Increases Coming in 2025

Every few years, the Patent Office changes its fee schedule, and 2025 is starting out with a bang. The new fees go into effect on January 19, 2025, so if you’re on the fence about filing something or taking any action at the Patent Office, you might want to do it by January 18th.

Most of the fees are going up about 7.5%, but there are some exceptions. If you look at the list of all the fees—it’s available as an Excel file—there are 471 lines of different fees. It can be very confusing because for some filings, the fee you think you need to pay isn’t actually the full fee. You have to add additional fees from other lines to know the total cost.

Overpayment Mistakes

Then there’s the opposite problem: I’ve had clients come to me after filing their own patent applications and paying way too much money because they added fees that didn’t need to be included. And trying to get a refund from the Patent Office can be a pain—if you can get your money back at all.

If you want to hire me to get your money back, the amount I charge for my time is probably more than the refund you’d get from the Patent Office. So unless you’re willing to do it yourself and figure out how to navigate the refund process correctly, you’re probably out that money.

Common Fees and Their Increases

I’ve gone through all the fees, and I’m going to walk you through the most common ones that I pay and show how much they’ve increased. I’m going to assume you’re a small entity, which means your business has fewer than 500 employees and your income is more than $223,000. If your income is below that threshold, you’re a micro entity, and your fees are usually about half of the small entity rate—but not always.

If you’re a large entity with more than 500 employees, then you can expect to pay about double the fees I’m quoting.

Here we go:

• Provisional application: Was $120, now $130 — about an 8% increase.

• Non-provisional application: Now $730, up from $664 — about a 10% increase.

• Request for prioritized examination (with processing fee): $1,866, up from $1,736 — 7.5% increase.

• Design application: Now $520, up from $408 — a 27% increase.

• Extension fees:

• 1 month – $94

• 2 months – $276

• 3 months – $636

• 4 months – $998

• 5 months – $1,358

• Utility issue fee: $516, up from $480 — a 7.5% increase.

• Design issue fee: $520, up from $296 — a 75% increase.

The design patent fees are the biggest jump, and I think it’s because the Patent Office realized they weren’t getting more money from design patent owners since there are no maintenance fees for them. So they just bumped up the issue fee.

Maintenance Fees for Utility Patents

The maintenance fees for utility patents have also gone up:

• 3.5 years: $860

• 7.5 years: $1,616

• 11.5 years: $3,312

These represent about a 7.5% increase across the board.

Requests for Continued Examination (RCE)

• First RCE: Now $600, up from $544 — a 10% increase.

• Second RCE: Now $1,144, up from $800 — a 43% increase.

Petitions to Revive Abandoned Applications

The revival system has changed. There used to be one fee of $840, but now there are two:

• Under 2 years abandoned: $904

• Over 2 years abandoned: $1,200

The likely reason for this change is that if an application has been abandoned for more than two years, the applicant must provide additional justification, which takes more time and resources for the Patent Office to review.

Want to Review All 471 Fees?

If you want to review all 471 lines of different fees, be my guest. You can visit the Patent Office website to find them. Or, you can avoid the headache and give me a call to handle your patent applications and figure all of that out for you.

But here’s the key: Don’t call me on January 18th to try to file things at the cheaper rate. Call me now, so we can get things done early and avoid the fee deadline altogether.

I’m Adam Diament—and keep on inventing!