The Patent Friction Index scores the U.S. patent system 42.62 points below the median of its four largest peers.

The single largest penalty falls on a metric where Europe scores worse than the United States.

Labrynth's Red Tape Index published the measure in August 2026, comparing the USPTO, EPO, CNIPA, JPO, and KIPO on four equally weighted pillars: official cost, pendency, share of resident grants going to individuals, and share of grants going to foreign applicants. Every score measures position against the other four offices. Equal weights, the index states, “are a choice, not a finding.”

The Pillar Scores

  • Pendency, -61.45. The U.S. averages 29.5 months to a final decision, against 12.9 in Japan and 15.5 in China. It is the slowest of the five and moving the wrong way, adding 8.3 months between 2021 and 2024 while Japan cut 2.4. The index cautions that each office starts this clock at a different event and publishes on its own basis. It counts 8,705 USPTO examiners, more than twice Europe's, against the longest wait of the five.
  • Foreign share, -64.59. Foreign-resident applicants take 55.50% of U.S. grants. Europe scores -64.97 on the same arithmetic, a slightly larger penalty than the United States. USPTO inventor-origin grants first crossed 50% foreign in 2008 and have stayed above that line since. The direction here is a scoring convention the index declares, treating a register where most grants go abroad as “serving the domestic inventor less.”
  • Independent inventors, -23.05. Individuals received 8.2% of U.S. resident grants in 2020, against 19.8% in Korea and 22.3% in the U.S. in 1980. Only three of the five offices publish the series, and the U.S. figure ends in 2020, before the current filing wave.
  • Cost, -21.39. Official fees to obtain and hold a representative patent to month 120 run $5,440 in the U.S., second-highest of the five behind Europe's $14,319 and roughly double Japan's $2,549.

IP Practice Insights

The foreign-share pillar counts the same class of foreign applicants WIPO's GenAI data show filing at scale from China, Japan, and Korea. Attracting those filings is a measure of demand. However, the index decided that a high foreign share counts against the USPTO. Pendency, in contrast, just counts the months an applicant waits for a decision, and delay is a cost nearly every applicant bears.

Two of the four pillars measure who files rather than how the office performs. On the two that measure performance, the USPTO has the second-highest fees of the five and the longest wait, and the wait is getting even worse.

Sources

  1. Patent Friction Index, United States, Red Tape Index (Labrynth), Aug. 13, 2026: https://redtapeindex.com/united-states/patents
  2. Labrynth announcement, Aug. 13, 2026: https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/08/13/3344430/0/en/u-s-patent-system-stacked-against-american-entrepreneurs-new-index-finds.html
  3. USPTO Patent Technology Monitoring Team, inventor-origin shares for 2008 and 2009: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/data/pat_tr09.htm