Increase in Federal Trademark Cost Explained

So why are they changing the fees? Well—there are a lot of words here but basically, they're changing their fees because they can and because they want to. This will make the cost to file a trademark even more than it already was. 

Because they feel that they should be charging more and there are all of those documents they're referring to—but as I said, lots of words, and it doesn't really make sense to any business owners who are trying to figure out how to best protect their brands. Let me just break it down for you.

Here are the actual fee changes. First of all, application fees. TEAS standard which by the way, some people say T-E-A-S, I say "TEAS'.

TEAS Standard is about $350 per class up from $275 per class and TEAS Plus is gonna be $250 per class up from $225 per class. 

Here's the difference between TEAS Standard and TEAS Plus. 

TEAS Plus is when you pick the list of goods and services that go into your trademark application from a predefined list whereas TEAS Standard gives you a lot more flexibility. 

If you have a special case—actually in many cases you can't pick ready-made items and you end up choosing from TEAS Standard. 

So what they're trying to do is they're trying to make their work easier so they're creating incentives for brand owners to keep using—to switch to TEAS Plus away from TEAS Standard. 

Initially, they also had the paper versions and they made the government fees for those even higher, to get people to TEAS Standard or to TEAS Plus, and now they're differentiating this even more.

Pros and Cons of the Different Cost to File a Trademark

Just so you know, many trademarks that we file are filed with TEAS Standard precisely because business owners want to have more specificity to what they do, to what they wanna protect their brands for, and the pre-defined "manual" that has the list that you can just reuse is not good enough so they would have to go and pay $75 more per class if they're using TEAS Standard. 

Again so going up from $275 to $350. TEAS Plus is going up a little bit, from $225 to $250. But still, that's quite an increase across the board in trademark costs. 

There's gonna be a processing fee for failing to meet TEAS Plus requirements so that would be $100. So the way this works is if you file in TEAS Plus and it doesn't qualify under TEAS Plus, you'll be paying the difference between TEAS Plus and TEAS Standard. 

Then there are post-registration fees, which is after your trademark registers, and you need to file a Statement of Use showing that you're still using the mark, the fee for the declaration filed to TEASwill be $225 per class up from $125 per class. So it's $100 more, it's almost double.

Trademark Costs are on the Rise

There's gonna be a new fee for deleting goods, services, or classes from registration after submitting a declaration but before the declaration is accepted. That would be $250 per class if filed through TEAS.

They also said that there will not be any fee if you electronically file the request to amend your registration before submitting a declaration of use and only delete goods, services, or classes in the request. 

So they're adding fees for you to delete goods and services from your registered mark and they're creating two pathways that this can happen, but if you wait until you have to file your statement of use. 

At that point you decide to delete some of the goods and services from your registration, that's going to cost you something that they didn't charge for before. 

Also, the petition to revive an abandoned application is going to cost you $150 up from $100, quite a raise there. It's also a somewhat common occurrence when you either miss a deadline, or there could be some technical glitch when you respond to some correspondence from the USPTO—it might be a day late, but it's considered "abandoned". 

And at that point, you have to revive your trademark application so it used to cost $100 now it costs $150. Cancellation proceedings are going up from $400 per class to $600 per class and the same for oppositions now they're going up from $400 per class to $600 per class.

It's a 50% raise. They're raising fees for requesting an extension of time to oppose and that's going up from $100 per application to $200 per application. 

You still get a free extension that you can request in the beginning for 30 days and the final 60-day goes up from $200 per application to $400 per application.

There are likely going to be additional fees for additional requests for an extension of time. Paper filing fee changes, really that's almost irrelevant because nobody files on paper anymore. 

You can go through the rest of the document—you will see what they have in store for you but really, the summary of this, and I wanted to make a very short video, just to let you know that time is running out.

Trademark Factory is Here to Help with Trademark Costs

You've got less than 2 months—less than a month and a half really, to take advantage of existing government fees to file your trademarks in the US with the old fee without having to pay more after January 2nd comes and you'll have to be paying a lot more in government fees. If you’re weighing trademark costs, apply now rather than wait for the federal trademark cost to go up.

So if you've been sitting on a fence, trying to decide if now is a good time to file a trademark or maybe a little later, now is the time to do it. So if you're interested in someone else doing it for you, I urge you to check out Trademark Factory®—we're the only firm in the world that can help you trademark your brand with a guaranteed result for a guaranteed budget. 

Really, if you're interested in trademarking your brand without wasting time and money on trademarks that don't go through, go to trademarkfactory.com and book a call with a strategy advisor and we'll help you get started.