Submitting an application to register your trademark is an exciting step for your business, and we know you’re eager to hear from us. For the last few years, a consistently high volume of new applications has caused our wait times to increase. Here’s what we’re doing to reduce those timeframes.
Increasing staff
In the last two fiscal years, we hired more than 140 examining attorneys. See our Become a trademark examining attorney page to learn more about working at the USPTO.
Streamlining the examination process
We introduced more concise first actions to improve examination efficiency and reduce the burden on examining attorneys and applicants. We also increased production on first actions by introducing individual and group incentives for examining attorneys. This initiative has been well-received and is already contributing to our goal to reduce wait times.
Improving IT capabilities
We retired our decades-old Trademark Reporting and Monitoring (TRAM) system in May 2024. This allows us to use more stable systems based on modern technology and coding and modernize other systems to further support wait time reduction efforts.
Agency-wide, we migrated more than 10 critical systems to the cloud, ensuring they’re always available. It also enables us to retire other legacy systems or modernize them as we adapt to new demands.
In 2024, we launched the beta version of Trademark Center, a new system we designed to improve our customers’ filing experience. The guided user interface takes users through the application step-by-step and notifies them if they’re missing information. This will increase the data quality in applications and support a more efficient examination process.