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The 60 and 80 Percent Fee Reductions

Final rule effective March 2023, implementing the Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022. Read from the primary document; quotations verified against its own text.

What it says

A final rule effective in March 2023 implemented the Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022 by raising the patent fee reduction for small entities from 50 to 60 percent and for micro entities from 75 to 80 percent, applying to filing, searching, examining, issuing, appealing and maintaining patents.

Small entities now pay 40 percent of the undiscounted fee rather than 50. Micro entities pay 20 percent rather than 25.

The reductions reach filing, searching, examining, issuing, appealing and maintaining, so they compound across the life of an application rather than applying once.

The larger discount also raises the cost of getting entity status wrong. The gap between what was paid and what was owed is bigger than it used to be.

What This Does Not Decide

This page does not tell you which entity you are. The qualification criteria are deliberately not set out here, so that nobody uses this page to self-assess. Entity status is a determination about a party's circumstances and it carries consequences when it is wrong.
  • It does not say whether any applicant qualifies as a small or micro entity.
  • It does not compute anyone's fees.
  • It concerns fees, not patentability.

Educational, not legal advice. This page reports what an authority says. Applying it to a matter is work for a registered practitioner with the file in front of them.

Sources