Twenty months after the USPTO began pricing completeness and penalizing customization in trademark filings, examination is faster and filings have not dropped.

In a recent article in World Trademark Review's Trademark Prosecution Review 2027, Rebecca Liebowitz and Sahar Ahmed of Venable LLP evaluate the effects of the 2025 fee changes. Effective January 18, 2025, the USPTO replaced the two online filing tiers ($250 and $350 per class) with a single $350 per class base fee, plus surcharges: $100 per class for missing required information, $200 per class for free-form descriptions of goods or services instead of pre-approved ID Manual entries, and a character surcharge on free-form text over 1,000 characters. One free-form entry triggers the $200 fee for every class, so a three-class filing with one custom description costs $1,650 instead of $1,050.

Effects So Far

  • Faster examination. The average wait for an examiner's first action fell 25% in FY 2025 and another 20% in the first half of FY 2026, to about 4.5 months.
  • Demand held. Filings rose 7% through midyear FY 2026, and March 2026 was the fifth-highest filing month on record. The authors call the filing increase too recent to attribute to the new fee rules.
  • Front-loaded filings. The authors report many applicants now assemble declarations, specimens, and ID Manual descriptions before filing, rather than securing a date with a bare-bones application and fixing defects later.
  • Costs rose and shifted. The authors describe a new trade-off: lower USPTO fees with more attorney time and narrower pre-approved descriptions, or higher USPTO fees for custom scope.
  • Foreign applicants bear more. Applicants relying on a home-country registration often need free-form text to match the registration's scope, costing at least $550 per class.
  • A gap for bad actors. The character surcharge reaches only free-form text, so "kitchen sink" applications built from long lists of pre-approved entries draw no added fee.

Filing Takeaways

  • Weigh scope. Descriptions can be narrowed after filing but cannot be broadened, so a Manual entry chosen to save $200 can leave the application narrower than the goods and services offered.
  • Madrid alternative has limits. Madrid Protocol extensions of international registrations to the U.S. pay a flat $600 per class and no surcharges, since the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) cannot yet collect surcharges. The USPTO plans to revisit the exemption once WIPO can. A Madrid extension cannot later move goods into another class or shift to the USPTO's Supplemental Register for marks not yet distinctive.

The surcharge system has turned describing goods and services from a prosecution task into a significant pre-filing cost decision.

Sources

  1. Liebowitz & Ahmed (Venable LLP), "USPTO fee reforms reshape filing strategy for US trademark applicants," WTR Trademark Prosecution Review 2027 (Sept. 10, 2026): https://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/review/the-trademark-prosecution-review/2027/article/specialist-chapter-uspto-fee-reforms-reshape-filing-strategy-us-trademark-applicants
  2. USPTO, Summary of 2025 trademark fee changes: https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/fees-payment-information/summary-2025-trademark-fee-changes
  3. USPTO, Examination Guide 1-25 (Jan. 10, 2025): https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/TM-ExamGuide-1-25.pdf
  4. USPTO Trademark Alerts (Apr. 23, 2026; May 5, 2026): https://www.uspto.gov/subscription-center/2026/march-sets-record-trademarks-first-action-output-filings-rise-and and https://www.uspto.gov/subscription-center/2026/reducing-trademark-pendency-improving-processing
  5. Final rule: 89 Fed. Reg. 91,062 (Nov. 18, 2024); 37 C.F.R. ยงยง 2.6, 2.21, 2.22, 2.71(a)