The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently announced that it will increase patent fees effective January 19, 2025. The USPTO will raise almost all existing patent fees. Although the USPTO made a few exceptions for policy reasons, existing patent fees will generally be about 7.5 percent higher across the board. The USPTO will also add new types of patent fees.

The patent fee increase is the product of a multiyear study by the USPTO, which determined that the fee increase is necessary to provide sufficient financial resources to cover its costs. The USPTO cited inflation, examiner recruitment, and legislative-mandated small and micro entity discounts as reasons for the increased cost of administering the US patent system.

The new fees include a surcharge for information disclosures cumulatively submitting more than 50 references and for certain continuation patent applications. The USPTO asserted that the new information disclosure statements size surcharge will not affect many applications. It explained that approximately 87 percent of patent applications have 50 or fewer applicant-provided references. But surcharges kick in when the total number of references submitted by the applicant exceeds 50, 100, and 200.

After the effective date of the patent fee increase, a new continuation application that claims the benefit of any application filed on or before January 19, 2025, may incur a continuation surcharge fee in the thousands of dollars. The surcharge fee kicks in when the continuation is filed more than six years after the earliest benefit date and is even greater when a continuation is filed more than nine years after that benefit date.

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