How Patent Applications End Without a Patent
Almost always by silence. Of 242,937 abandoned US utility applications filed 2020 to 2022, 92.6% ended because no reply was filed to an Office action and the period ran out. Express withdrawal accounts for 1.5%.
The word abandonment suggests a decision: someone concluded the application was not worth pursuing and withdrew it. The record shows something quieter. The reply period, with its extensions, simply expires.
When it happens
The median abandonment comes 212 days after the last Office action and 35.2 months after filing. Those two numbers together describe the shape of it: roughly seven months of nothing following an action, about three years after the application was filed.
Does the family end too?
An abandoned application is often read as an abandoned invention. That one the record can answer directly. A continuation, divisional or continuation-in-part filed from the application carries the family on, and those children have outcomes of their own.
Nearly nine in ten abandoned applications leave no continuing application at all. For those, the application and the family ended together, at least in the United States. About one in twelve lives on: 8.6% have a continuing application that was granted or is still pending.
| How it was abandoned | Applications | Family lives on | Continuing application granted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Did not reply to an Office action | 224,959 | 7.8% | 3.1% |
| Express abandonment | 3,806 | 19.6% | 13.8% |
| Did not pay the issue fee | 10,890 | 8.6% | 5.2% |
| Other | 3,282 | 16.6% | 4.0% |
Express abandonment is the kind that behaves differently: one family in five lives on, and 13.8% already have a granted child. That fits the reading the rest of this page cannot support, a deliberate decision to drop one application in favour of another. It is also the rarest kind, at 1.5% of all abandonments, which is the point: the deliberate-looking ending is the uncommon one.
One other split is worth naming. An abandoned application that was itself a continuing application lives on in 14.5% of cases, against 6.4% for an original. Families that have already continued once tend to continue again.
US continuing applications only. A family can also continue abroad, or the applicant can file a new, unrelated application on the same subject, and neither is visible here. Pending descendants are still resolving, so the granted share will rise. Shares are rounded and do not sum to exactly 100%.
What this does not include
- Applications abandoned before publication are not public, so they are not in this count.
- A continuing application filed instead of further prosecution can show as an abandonment of the parent, which is a strategic choice rather than a loss. That is the 8.6% counted above, and it is the minority.
- This counts how an application ended, not whether the invention was protected some other way.
Our own counts from the USPTO record. These describe what happened across past applications. They say nothing about any particular application, they are associations rather than causes, and none of this is legal advice.
The figures on this page are available as a CSV: /data/how-applications-end-without-a-patent.csv. It is generated from the tables and charts above, so it carries the same numbers and cannot fall out of step with them.