How Long Does a US Patent Take?
About two to three years for the typical filer. 54.9% of US utility applications filed in 2021 were granted within 36 months, and the median granted application took 27.2 months. The field matters more than anything else.
Timing figures are drawn from the 2021 filing cohort and from 673,881 granted applications filed 2020 to 2021, with status observed to 26 October 2026.
It depends on the field more than on anything else
A three-year expectation is close to right in communications and badly wrong in biotechnology. The median granted application took 27.2 months overall, with the middle half between 19.1 and 35.3 months.
Grants got slower, not faster
Median time to grant looks like it is falling for recent filing years, but that is an artefact: the slow applications in those years have not finished, so they are not in the median yet. Measured over the same 36-month window for every cohort, a smaller share was granted in time.
Three cohorts only, and the 2022 window closed at the end of 2025.
Where the time actually goes
The belief is that the wait is all the patent office. For the median granted application, the single largest stage is indeed waiting for a first action, but the stages that end in an applicant's own filing are not negligible either.
| Stage | Median days | Middle half | Share of all days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waiting for a first action | 519 | 357 to 738 | 62.0% |
| From an Office action to the reply | 97 | 63 to 182 | 15.2% |
| From a reply to the next action | 45 | 14 to 109 | 8.9% |
| From allowance to the issue fee | 86 | 57 to 93 | 8.5% |
| From the issue fee to grant | 39 | 34 to 43 | 4.9% |
| Appeal | 0 | 0 to 0 | 0.4% |
| Filing to grant | 845 | 620 to 1,113 |
Two different measures sit side by side here, and they do not add up to each other. The share of all days column pools every application's days together: on that basis the stages ending in an applicant's filing are 15.2% plus 8.5%, or 23.7%. Measured instead against the median application's own 845 days, those stages are 22.7% of its pendency, and replies alone are 13.3%. Both are in the table's source; neither is the other's arithmetic.
Stages are named by the events that bound them, not by who caused the time. Reply periods and extensions are set by rule, so a long reply stage is not by itself a delay anybody chose.
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-long-does-a-patent-take.csv. It is generated from the tables and charts above, so it carries the same numbers and cannot fall out of step with them.