A US utility patent is not paid for once. It is paid for four times — the issue fee at grant, then three patent maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5 and 11.5 years afterwards. Miss any one of them and the patent expires permanently — see do patents expire for what that means in practice.
Most owners stop paying. Of US utility patents granted in 2014, only 41.4% had all three maintenance fees paid. The rest lapsed, and the great majority of those lapses were deliberate decisions rather than mistakes.
What the fees cost
| Fee | Due at | Large entity | Small entity | Micro entity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First | 3.5 years after grant | $2,150 | $860 | $430 |
| Second | 7.5 years after grant | $4,040 | $1,616 | $808 |
| Third | 11.5 years after grant | $8,280 | $3,312 | $1,656 |
| Total over the life | $14,470 | $5,788 | $2,894 |
USPTO fees effective January 2025, revised roughly every one to three years. Excludes attorney and annuity service charges.
The fees escalate deliberately. The third payment is nearly four times the first. That structure is a policy choice: the Office wants owners who no longer see value in a patent to release it into the public domain rather than hold it defensively for two decades at trivial cost.
And they have escalated over time. The 11.5-year large entity fee was $3,100 in 2001. It is $8,280 now — a 167% increase against roughly 80% cumulative inflation over the same period. That single change explains most of the decline in full-term maintenance, which has fallen from 51.1% to 41.4% across the same years.
The published schedule is not the total cost. Add the surcharge if you pay during a grace period, attorney fees if counsel handles the payment, and annuity service fees if you use one. A patent maintained through a service across its full life can cost half again what the USPTO fee schedule suggests.
The patent maintenance fee schedule
The dates run from grant, not filing. This is the one place in US patent practice where the grant date is the anchor. Everywhere else — the twenty-year term, priority, prior art — the filing date governs. Owners who diarise from the filing date miss the window by however long prosecution took.
Each fee has a window, not a date:
| Stage | Window opens | Window closes | Grace period ends |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | 3 years after grant | 3.5 years | 4 years |
| Second | 7 years after grant | 7.5 years | 8 years |
| Third | 11 years after grant | 11.5 years | 12 years |
Paying during the grace period costs a surcharge but keeps the patent alive with no other consequence. There is no penalty beyond the surcharge and no mark against the patent.
Paying after the grace period is not possible. The patent has expired. What follows is a petition, not a payment.
You cannot prepay. A fee can only be paid during its own window, so the obligation recurs three times across twelve years and each occasion is a fresh decision. There is no mechanism to settle a patent's maintenance cost up front.
A worked date calculation. A patent granted 18 June 2019 has:
- First window 18 June 2022 to 18 December 2022, grace to 18 June 2023
- Second window 18 June 2026 to 18 December 2026, grace to 18 June 2027
- Third window 18 June 2030 to 18 December 2030, grace to 18 June 2031
After that, nothing further is due and the patent runs to its term expiry.
How to pay, and who can pay
Payment goes through USPTO Patent Center. You need the patent number and the application number, and you certify entity status as part of the transaction. Payment is immediate and the receipt is generated at once.
The payer does not have to be the owner. The USPTO accepts payment from anyone — the inventor, an attorney, an annuity service, or a third party entirely. This is why annuity services work, and it is also why a patent can occasionally be maintained by someone with a commercial interest in keeping it alive who is not the owner of record.
Confirm the payment posted. A payment submitted is not a payment recorded. Check Patent Center afterwards and confirm the fee shows against the patent. Payments made close to a deadline through an intermediary are the ones most worth verifying.
What the USPTO reminder actually is
The Office sends a maintenance fee reminder to the correspondence address of record, typically a few months into the window. It is a courtesy, not a requirement. The statute does not condition expiry on the reminder being received, and the patent lapses whether or not anybody read it.
This matters because the correspondence address is frequently stale. It is set at filing, often to a law firm whose engagement ended at grant. A patent whose prosecuting attorney retired, or whose owner has moved twice since issue, still generates a reminder — sent somewhere nobody is reading.
The common failure is not carelessness. It is address drift, and it accounts for a meaningful share of accidental abandonments. Updating the correspondence address after prosecution ends costs nothing and is almost never done.
Checking status in Patent Center
To confirm where a patent stands, look it up in Patent Center and compare recorded payments against the grant date.
What you want to see: a payment recorded at each stage the patent has reached. If a window and its grace period have both closed with nothing recorded, the patent has expired.
What to be careful about: the record can lag actual payment by a short period, so a very recent payment may not yet appear. And commercial patent databases update on their own schedules — a patent shown as active in a third-party tool may have lapsed weeks earlier. For anything that matters, check the USPTO record directly.
Entity status: the biggest variable in the cost
Entity status is certified at each payment rather than fixed at grant, and the difference across a patent's life is substantial — $14,470 against $2,894, a gap of $11,576 on the same patent.
Small entity status under 37 CFR 1.27 pays 40%. It requires fewer than 500 employees including affiliates, and no assignment, licence or obligation to assign rights to an entity that would not itself qualify. A university spinout that licensed its patent to a large corporation has lost small entity status even though the spinout itself is tiny.
Micro entity status under 37 CFR 1.29 pays 20%. It requires small entity status, plus being named as inventor on fewer than five prior US non-provisional applications, plus gross income in the preceding calendar year below approximately $251,190 — three times median household income, adjusted periodically. There is also an alternative route for applicants whose employer is an institution of higher education.
| Status | Rate | Total across three fees | Key test |
|---|---|---|---|
| Large entity | 100% | $14,470 | Default |
| Small entity | 40% | $5,788 | <500 employees, no assignment to large entity |
| Micro entity | 20% | $2,894 | Small entity + <5 prior applications + income cap |
The trap is claiming a status you have lost. A startup that qualified as a micro entity at filing may have crossed the income threshold or the application count by the second fee, eight years later. Paying at the wrong rate creates a fee deficiency, and correcting it afterwards under 37 CFR 1.28 requires a further petition and payment of the difference.
Status can also move the other way. A patent assigned from a large corporation to an individual inventor, or a company that has shrunk below 500 employees, may newly qualify for a reduction that nobody has claimed.
Check before every payment, not once at the start. Twelve years is enough time for circumstances to change twice.
What actually happens: the survival data
Computed from every maintenance fee event the USPTO has recorded — 27,273,654 rows covering 8,262,336 US utility patents granted since 1981.
| Grant year | Survived first fee | Survived second | Reached full term |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 85.7% | 68.7% | 51.1% |
| 2005 | 87.5% | 69.3% | 46.0% |
| 2010 | 86.6% | 65.9% | 43.1% |
| 2014 | 85.8% | 64.6% | 41.4% |
Attrition is not evenly spread. 14.2% of patents lapse at the first fee, but the largest single drop comes at the third — 23.2 percentage points between the 7.5-year and 11.5-year stages.
| Stage | Cumulative survival | Lost at this stage | Fee that caused it |
|---|---|---|---|
| At grant | 100% | — | — |
| Past first fee | 85.8% | 14.2% | $2,150 |
| Past second fee | 64.6% | 21.2 points | $4,040 |
| Past third fee | 41.4% | 23.2 points | $8,280 |
The pattern tracks the money. Each escalation in the fee produces a larger drop-off, which is what the schedule was designed to do.
Full figures by grant year are on the Ipiry Patent Survival Curve.
The conditional rate matters more than the average
The 41.4% figure averages across owners who abandoned immediately and owners who paid all three times. If you have already paid once, you are not an average patent owner.
| Position | Share who pay the next fee |
|---|---|
| Paid the first fee | 74.3% pay the second |
| Paid the first two | 63.0% pay the third |
Paying a maintenance fee is a revealed valuation. An owner who has paid twice has twice concluded the patent is worth more than the fee. That is why 63% of them pay a third time, against an overall full-term rate of 41.4%.
The population that abandons early is largely people who never had a commercial use for the patent. If you have paid once, you are probably not in it.
A worked example: three fees, three outcomes
A software patent, small entity, granted June 2019.
The straightforward case
| Fee | Date | Cost | Situation |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Dec 2022 | $860 | Product shipping, licensee in discussion |
| Second | Dec 2026 | $1,616 | Licence signed, royalties running |
| Third | Dec 2030 | $3,312 | Royalties continuing, four years to term |
| Total | $5,788 | Patent runs to March 2035 |
On a patent producing revenue, the arithmetic is trivial. $5,788 across twelve years against a royalty stream is not a decision anyone agonises over.
The case where the third fee is the question
Same patent, but no licensee ever materialised and the technology has been superseded.
| Option | Cost | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Pay the third fee | $3,312 | Four years of exclusivity over a technology nobody uses |
| Let it lapse | $0 | Public domain, permanently |
| Sell before the window closes | $0, plus proceeds | Someone else's asset and someone else's fee |
This is the decision the 23.2-point drop-off at the third fee represents. The owner has paid twice, concluded the patent is not going to earn out, and is being asked for $3,312 to keep a right nobody is exercising.
Letting it lapse is often correct. What is rarely correct is letting it lapse without establishing whether anyone would have bought it, because both paths end the fee obligation and only one pays you.
The case where a fee is missed
The owner moves office in 2026, the reminder goes to the old address, and nobody notices until 2028.
| Event | Date | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Second fee due | 18 Dec 2026 | Not paid |
| Grace period ends | 18 Jun 2027 | Patent expires |
| Competitor launches | Sep 2027 | Began during the lapse |
| Discovery | Mar 2028 | Nine months after expiry |
| Petition to revive | 2028 | $1,616 + petition fee, discretionary |
The patent can probably be revived. It cannot be made whole. The competitor who started while it was lapsed may be permitted to continue under intervening rights — and that competitor is precisely the party the patent existed to exclude.
The cost of the miss is not $1,616. It is exclusivity against the one company that was watching.
Missing a fee, and whether it can be undone
Expiry is automatic. No notice is required beyond the standard reminder, no confirmation is sent, and no final demand arrives. The patent lapses at the end of the grace period and the invention enters the public domain.
Revival is possible but not reliable. Under 37 CFR 1.378 you may petition to accept a delayed payment if the entire delay — from due date to petition — was unintentional. That requires the outstanding fee, a petition fee, and a statement of unintentional delay. The Office may require further explanation for long delays, and a statement made carelessly carries its own consequences.
Unintentional is not the same as unavoidable. Forgetting counts. A docketing failure counts. A deliberate decision not to pay, later regretted because circumstances changed, does not.
Intervening rights are the real cost. Anyone who began practising the invention in good faith while the patent was lapsed may be permitted to continue after revival. The companies most likely to have started during a lapse are the ones who were watching the patent — the most likely infringers and the most likely buyers. A revived patent can be enforceable against everyone except the people who mattered.
Annuity services and when they earn their fee
What they do. Track deadlines across jurisdictions, convert currency, pay on time, and confirm payment posted. Better ones also monitor entity status and provide portfolio reporting.
When they are worth it. A family spanning several countries with annual deadlines in each is genuinely difficult to manage manually, and the failure mode is permanent loss of the patent in that jurisdiction. That is the problem a service solves.
When they are not. A single US patent has three payments across twelve years. That is a calendar entry, not an operational burden, and a service fee stacked on top of the government fee is money that could have gone to the fee itself.
What to ask before engaging one. Whether they confirm payment posted or merely attempt it. What their liability is if they miss. Whether they track entity status changes or simply pay at whatever rate is on file. And what their fee is as a proportion of the government fee — a service charging a meaningful percentage of a $860 payment is not saving anyone money.
Deciding whether to pay
A maintenance fee is not an administrative task. It is the purchase of four more years of exclusivity at a stated price, and it is worth treating as a purchase.
Is anyone practising the invention? The single largest factor, and one most owners never properly establish. It means looking at what competitors actually ship — product literature, specifications, their own patent filings — and comparing that against your claims element by element. A patent nobody infringes has option value rather than enforcement value, and option value falls as term runs down.
Is the technology still current? A patent covering a superseded approach, arriving at its 11.5-year fee, is usually one to release. Eleven years is a long time in most fields.
What would it sell for? This is the question the fee decision actually reduces to. A patent with commercial relevance is worth more sold than lapsed, and the fee window is a forcing function — a patent sold before the deadline is worth something, and one that lapsed last month is worth nothing.
That asymmetry is why patent valuation tends to happen at renewal deadlines rather than at any other point in a patent's life.
Before your next payment
- Calculate the exact date from the grant date, and note both the window close and the grace period end.
- Check the correspondence address of record is somewhere you actually read.
- Recheck entity status — it may have moved in either direction since the last payment.
- Establish whether anyone is practising the invention, because that is the difference between an asset and a cost.
- Get a valuation before the window closes. A lapsed patent cannot be sold.
- If you will not pay, offer it for sale first. The buyer inherits the fee and you recover something rather than nothing.
- Confirm the payment posted in Patent Center rather than assuming it did.
- Diarise the next window the day you pay. Missing the second fee after paying the first wastes the first payment entirely.