Chapter 2500: Maintenance Fees
Maintenance fees must be paid on all utility applications filed after December 12, 1980. Maintenance fees are not required on design or plant patents. The fees are due 3, 7 and 11 years after the patent is issued. The date used for calculating the due dates of the fees varies depending on specific circumstances, however, it is usually the U.S. filing date for the application.
In regards to paying the fees, there is a 6 month time period within which they should be paid. If the fees are not paid after that window of time there is a 6 month grace period where the fee plus a surcharge may be paid to keep the patent from expiring. If nothing is paid by this time, the patent will expire and will be considered abandoned.
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The Executive Summaries from the main chapter sections have been copied here for your convenience (subsections are not included here). They will help you remember what each main section of the Guidebook (MPEP) covers as you answer the questions from the quizzes above.
Standard patent terms are generally fairly long; 20 years in the case of utility patents. But, in order to keep a patent from expiring, maintenance fees must be paid over the duration of the term. No fee is required for maintaining a design or plant patent, but all others must pay to keep the patent from expiring. This section provides an overview of maintenance fees including the normal payment schedule and the grace periods.
Maintenance fees are required on all patents based on applications filed on or after December 12, 1980, with the exception of plant and design patents. In addition, fees are not required for reissue patents only when the patent being reissued did not require maintenance fees. This section provides further details on the patents subject to maintenance fees.
This section covers the important application filing dates for the purposes of determining maintenance fee payments. It covers the time periods when maintenance fees may be paid without a surcharge and those when they can be paid with a surcharge.
This section establishes the guidelines for the submission of maintenance fees. It covers who may pay the fees and the identification required with the maintenance fee payment.
Small entities receive a 50% reduction in price.
This section outlines the ways a maintenance fee may be paid. In addition, it covers instances when the payment will not be accepted (like, for instance, when the payment is less than the required amount).
This section covers the special acceptance of maintenance fee payments containing informalities.
All notices will be directed to the correspondence address unless a “fee address” has been designated.
Maintenance fee reminders will be sent to the correspondence address used during the application prosecution unless a fee address is listed. Any assignments made will not receive any correspondence unless a change of correspondence address for the patent file has been sent in.
Changes in the correspondence address may be made by the inventor(s) named in the patent, an attorney or agent of record or by the assignee. A change of correspondence address made prior to the filing of an oath or declaration is made, whereas a change of correspondence address made after the filing of an executed oath or declaration is made.
Patentees should check for the loss of small entity status prior to the payment of each maintenance fee. If payment is submitted that conflicts with the Office record of patentee’s entity status, a Notice of Non-acceptance of the maintenance fee will be sent to the fee submitter (or a Notice of Overpayment if the fee was sent in access).
The Office has no duty to notify patentees when their maintenance fees are due. However, they try to send out a reminder notice during the grace period. Notices provided by the Office should merely be thought of as a courteous reminder attempt, the Office is not required to send anything at all.
It is always the patentee’s responsibility to pay the maintenance fee on time, the failure to receive the reminder notice will never shift the burden to the Office. A notice will appear in the Official Gazette indicating which patents are up for maintenance fees.
This section relates to the patentees choices if the PTO refuses their maintenance fee and the patent has not yet expired.
Any patentee who is dissatisfied with the refusal of the PTO to accept and record a maintenance fee which was filed prior to the expiration of the patent may petition the Commissioner to accept and record the maintenance fee. Any petition under this section must be filed within 2 months of the action complained of.
This section describes what the patentee may do if the PTO refuses their maintenance fee and the patent has already expired. It includes a discussion on the requirements to petition both an unavoidably delay and an unintentional delay.
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