The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has announced changes to its trademark fees, effective January 18, 2025, which will result in significant increases to filing costs for new applications and standard fee increases across other required filings.

Moving forward, all trademark applications filed with the USPTO will have a single "base application" fee of $350. However, the new filing structure includes additional surcharges that will significantly impact the overall costs of filing new trademark applications.

The first set of surcharges relates to what the USPTO is calling "insufficient information." The "insufficient information" surcharge of $100 per class will apply when (1) the basic requirements for a base application are missing, such as an applicant's name, address, or citizenship; and/or (2) the application lacks additional details like an English translation of a non-English term, a description of the mark, a verified statement, or prior registrations that should be referenced in the application. Previously, such information could be provided, if necessary, during the prosecution of the trademark application without additional USPTO fees. Reed Smith will advise applicants on all requirements at the outset of any new filings to avoid such surcharges or work with applicants to develop an appropriate filing strategy in light of these new fees.

Further increases in USPTO filing fees will be driven by a new requirement that all applications either (1) use descriptions of goods or services from the USPTO Trademark ID Manual to avoid any additional fee; or (2) use a free-form description of the covered goods or services that is not listed in the USPTO Trademark ID Manual, which will result in an automatic additional surcharge of $200 for the first 1,000 characters. There will then be an additional surcharge of $200 for each additional group of 1,000 characters used to describe the goods or services in each class covered by the application. This 1,000-character limit per class includes punctuation and spaces, and thus only allows for short descriptions. Complex trademark applications often include several thousand characters to describe the covered goods or services. Under the new filing structure, such descriptions will result in hundreds of dollars of additional USPTO fees.

For ease of reference, the below schedules list (1) the base application fee; (2) surcharge fees associated with trademark applications; and (3) fee increases for other prosecution and maintenance activities.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the new filing structure or other fee increases, Reed Smith's trademark team is happy to assist.