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Filing Years and Patent Application Serial Numbers Since 1882

Table of Filing Years and Patent Application Serial Numbers,
for Patent Applications Filed Since 1882 -- for selected document types *

02/18/2016

* Notes:

n/a : Information for blocks labeled as "n/a" is either not available or not applicable.

In general, patent application serial numbers are assigned chronologically to patent applications filed at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). For this reason, application serial numbers and filing dates will generally correspond. Please note, however, that there are some applications for which the serial number and filing date may not fall within the time periods indicated in the above table.

For example, for applications based on patent applications filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), the U.S. filing date is the date of filing of the PCT application. For these PCT-based patent applications, the year displayed for a patent application serial number very generally corresponds to the year when the PCT-based application entered USPTO's internal patent examination process (rather than to the year of U.S. patent filing). Also, the relationship between a patent application serial number and the corresponding U.S. filing date can differ as a result of the form of the application submission, as received at USPTO. This occurs because of the different processes used to assign serial numbers to incoming paper application submissions as compared to incoming electronic application submissions and may result in some serial numbers that fall outside of the time periods shown in the table.

For more recently filed patent applications, the complete patent application serial number consists of two parts, the application series code and the six digit application serial number. For some earlier years displayed in the table, the application series code is not available.

During some time periods, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office used a common numbering system for assigning application numbers to design and utility patent applications. During other time periods, separate numbering systems were used for the two types of patent applications. For those years when a common numbering system was in effect, the user should refer to the utility patent application serial numbers in the table.

For plant patent applications and reissue patent applications, the utility patent application serial number ranges displayed in the table can be used to determine the approximate year when the patent application was filed based on its application serial number.

Starting October 1, 1992, design patent applications are assigned separate application serial numbers which are associated with newly established application series codes, beginning with "29".

Starting June 8, 1995, the PTO began to accept provisional patent applications in accordance with implemented legislation arising from the GATT Uruguay Round World Trade Organization Agreement. Provisional patent applications receive separate serial numbers that are associated with newly established application series codes, beginning with "60", "61", or "62".

Please note that this table should not be relied upon to obtain counts of patent applications filed during a particular year. For such statistics, the Patent Technology Monitoring Team (PTMT) report, U.S. Patent Activity, 1790-CurrentYear, should be consulted.

Data Sources:

• Figures from 1972 to the present are obtained from the PTO applications log and from the Office of Initial Patent Examination.
• Figures for years prior to 1972 are estimates based on a manual inspection of application serial numbers that appear in the Official Gazette patent publication that is published weekly.

PTMT Contacts

Questions regarding this report should be directed to:

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Electronic Information Products Division - PTMT
P.O Box 1450
Alexandria VA 22313-1450

tel: (571) 272-5600
fax: (571) 273-0110
email: oeip@uspto.gov

address of PTMT pages at the USPTO Web Site: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/reports.htm
selected PTMT files available for download at : http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/data/

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