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Filing and Fees

The short version

Four changes to what a filing costs and how it has to be made. Entity discounts went up, information disclosure statements gained a size fee and a required written assertion, the free after-final look expired, and correspondence may now be signed through third-party software.

None of these pages computes a fee or assesses a filing. Thresholds and qualification criteria are deliberately absent.

These are the mechanics that touch every application, which makes them the easiest to carry forward out of habit after they have changed.

Two are pure cost: the Unleashing American Innovators Act raised entity discounts, and the FY2025 fee rule added information disclosure statement size fees on a cumulative basis. The larger discounts also raise the cost of getting entity status wrong, because the gap between paid and owed is bigger than it used to be.

Two are mechanics: AFCP 2.0 expired, so the free after-final look is gone, and from March 2024 patent correspondence may be signed through third-party document-signing software, subject to two conditions that are easy to satisfy accidentally and easy to break deliberately.

The Authorities

Small and micro entity fees Bigger discounts mean a wrong entity-status call costs more than it used to. Read the Authority IDS size fees Every information disclosure statement now needs a written assertion about its fee. Read the Authority AFCP 2.0 expiration The free after-final look is gone; plan the interview earlier. Read the Authority DOCX and e-signatures Software may now carry the signature, but the signer's own hand still has to make it. Read the Authority

What These Pages Do Not Decide

  • Whether any applicant qualifies as a small or micro entity. The criteria are not reproduced here, on purpose.
  • Whether a particular information disclosure statement owes a fee, or what an application has accumulated.
  • Whether a specific signature workflow complies, or whether any filing owes the surcharge.
  • What to do after a final rejection.

Educational, not legal advice. These pages concern fees and filing mechanics. None of them says anything about patentability, novelty or non-obviousness.

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