What Happens After a Final Rejection?
Usually, prosecution continues. Of 231,745 US utility applications with a first final rejection mailed 2021 to 2023, 60.9% filed a request for continued examination next and 22.6% were allowed without one. Separately, 71.6% of those applications had been granted by October 2026. That counts the same application issuing, not a child of it.
"Final" is a term of art. It closes one round of examination rather than the application, and the record shows most applicants treat it that way.
Abandonment after a final is almost never a formal withdrawal: express abandonment accounts for 0.03% of these. An after-final consideration request was filed alongside one of the above in 31.6% of cases.
This is the next step only, not the final outcome. The remaining 1.2% is a new non-final or a second final without an RCE or appeal, or still open.
Where it ends up, four years on
The next step is not the outcome. Following 631,624 applications from the date of their first final rejection, and counting grant and abandonment as competing outcomes, most of the question is settled inside two years.
| Months after the first final | Granted | Abandoned | Still pending |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 months | 42.6% | 15.4% | 42.0% |
| 24 months | 63.0% | 23.8% | 13.2% |
| 36 months | 68.1% | 26.9% | 5.0% |
| 48 months | 69.8% | 28.2% | 2.0% |
Seven in ten applications with a final rejection are granted within four years, and about three in ten are abandoned. Almost nothing is still open at four years. The first two years do most of the work: 63.0% are granted by 24 months, and the two years after that add 6.8 points.
Resolution is not evenly spread across fields. 58.0% of all first finals are granted or abandoned within the first year, but only 48.2% in biotechnology, where more than half are still unresolved a year after the final.
Which path the grants come by
Classifying each grant by what happened between the final and the grant gives a clearer answer than the next-step chart above, because it follows the application to its end rather than to its next event.
| Months | No RCE | One RCE | Two or more RCEs | After an appeal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 months | 21.0% | 20.2% | 0.7% | 0.7% |
| 24 months | 21.4% | 33.5% | 6.1% | 2.0% |
| 48 months | 21.5% | 34.0% | 10.4% | 3.9% |
One RCE is the commonest route to a grant after a final, at 34.0% of all first finals against 21.5% granted with no RCE at all. The two columns behave differently over time: grants without an RCE nearly all arrive in the first year, and that column barely moves afterwards, while the RCE columns keep climbing into the second and third. Among applications granted within four years, the median time from the final to the grant was 9.6 months.
Each share counts only applications followed that long, so the 48-month row rests on finals mailed 2019 to 2022. The cohorts are not alike: within 2018-2021 filings, a final mailed in 2019 belongs to an application examined early and one mailed in 2024 to one examined late, so differences across years of the final mix that selection with any change at the Office.
What a first RCE actually buys
An RCE reopens prosecution. It does not usually produce an allowance straight away: the next action after one is another rejection in 67.3% of cases.
About one in five needs a second RCE. After a second, 49.2% are allowed without a third. In biotechnology that figure is 43.5%.
A continuing application filed instead of further prosecution shows here as abandoned or pending, so the abandonment share overstates applications that were genuinely given up.
What changed when the after-final pilot ended
The after-final consideration pilot closed in December 2024. The expectation was that everyone would simply file an RCE instead. RCEs barely moved.
| What came next | 2023 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Filed an RCE | 61.1% | 62.7% |
| Allowed without an RCE | 20.2% | 16.6% |
| Abandoned | 17.3% | 19.8% |
The movement is in the other two rows: fewer applications were allowed after a final without an RCE, and more were abandoned.
A before and after comparison, not a controlled one. Examiners, backlog and applicants all changed over the same period, so the pilot ending is one candidate explanation among several. The two windows are also unequal in two ways: a full year against nine months, and two more years in which the 2023 actions could reveal a next event. Both push the comparison in the same direction, which is why the RCE share moving by 1.6 points is better read as "barely moved" than as a measured effect.
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/what-happens-after-a-final-rejection.csv. It is generated from the tables and charts above, so it carries the same numbers and cannot fall out of step with them.