Executive Summary
6 min read
- Patent maintenance fees 2026 fall due three times over a utility patent’s life: at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after grant. Miss all three windows and the patent expires for good.
- Fees scale with entity size. A large company pays up to 4x what a small entity pays, and up to 16x what a micro entity (many independent inventors and small startups) pays at the 11.5-year mark.
- Each fee has a 6-month payment window followed by a 6-month grace period. The grace period isn’t free: a surcharge applies on top of the fee itself.
- If you miss both windows, the patent lapses. It can sometimes be revived by petition, but only if the missed payment was genuinely unintentional, and only within a hard time limit.
- Design and plant patents don’t have maintenance fees at all. This only applies to utility patents.
Patent maintenance fees 2026 come due at three fixed points after a patent is granted, and a utility patent only runs its full 20 years if all three get paid. Unlike the one-time filing and issue fees most applicants budget for, these are recurring, and the current schedule is steeper than a lot of patent owners remember it being. Miss all three windows on any one of them and the patent expires. Not suspended, not downgraded. Gone.
Patent maintenance fees 2026: the three due dates
Every utility patent has the same three maintenance-fee deadlines, measured from the date it was granted, not filed:
- 3.5 years after grant
- 7.5 years after grant
- 11.5 years after grant
There’s no fee due at any other point, and there’s no maintenance fee at all on design patents or plant patents. This three-payment structure is specific to utility patents. The USPTO’s own fee schedule is the authoritative source and worth bookmarking directly, since these numbers do change.
What you actually owe
Patent maintenance fees 2026 are scaled to the size of the entity paying them. Large companies pay the full rate, small entities (most startups and small businesses) pay half, and micro entities (many independent inventors, and small entities that also meet income and prior-application limits) pay a quarter:
| Due date | Large entity | Small entity | Micro entity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.5 years | $2,000 | $1,000 | $500 |
| 7.5 years | $3,760 | $1,880 | $940 |
| 11.5 years | $7,700 | $3,850 | $1,925 |
That’s a meaningful step-up at each stage. The 11.5-year fee for a large entity is nearly four times the 3.5-year fee, which catches some patent owners off guard if they only budgeted for the first payment. These figures reflect the fee increases that took effect January 19, 2025. The same increase raised filing-side fees, so budget from the current schedule rather than an older quote if you are filing something new.
The window, the grace period, and what the grace period actually costs
Each maintenance fee opens for payment 6 months before its due date and stays payable for 6 months after. That’s a full year, in effect, once you count the grace period. But the second half of that year isn’t free. Paying during the grace period adds a surcharge on top of the fee itself: $500 for large entities, $200 for small entities, $100 for micro entities. Pay on time in the first window and you skip the surcharge entirely.
What happens if you miss both windows
Miss the fee and the grace period both, and the patent expires at the end of the grace period, automatically, with no separate notice required. From that point, anyone is free to make, use, or sell what the patent covered, exactly as if the patent had never existed.
There’s one way back: a petition to revive an unintentionally lapsed patent, filed with the USPTO along with the overdue fee and a separate petition fee ($1,050 for large entities, $420 for small entities, $210 for micro entities). Two things make this narrower than it sounds. First, “unintentional” is a real legal standard, not a formality. The petition has to genuinely support that the missed payment wasn’t a deliberate decision to let the patent lapse.
Second, there’s a hard outer limit. The petition has to be filed before either six years from the missed due date, or the patent’s original expiration date, whichever comes first. MPEP § 711, the USPTO’s own examination manual, sets out what that petition has to show.
Even a successful revival can come with a catch. Anyone who started making, using, or selling the invention during the window the patent was lapsed may keep an “intervening right” to keep doing so, even after the patent comes back to life. A revived patent isn’t always a fully restored patent from a competitor’s standpoint.
Why this is worth tracking deliberately, not reactively
Three patent maintenance fees over 20 years sounds manageable in the abstract, but a lot of patent owners lose track for an ordinary reason. The person who filed the original application isn’t always still the person managing the company’s IP eleven years later, and the USPTO’s own reminders aren’t a substitute for an internal system. Anyone holding more than a handful of patents is better served by a maintained fee-due calendar (many patent attorneys and most large-firm docketing systems handle this automatically) than by relying on catching a USPTO notice in the mail. If you’re not sure how long your existing patents are even supposed to last, our post on how long patents last is a good starting point.
How this connects to what a patent costs overall
Patent maintenance fees 2026 are not part of the sticker price most people quote when they ask how much a patent costs. That number is usually just the filing, prosecution, and issue fees. The real 20-year cost of a utility patent, especially for a large entity, includes these three payments on top of everything it took to get the patent granted in the first place. Worth factoring in before deciding how many patents to file, not after the first one issues.
FAQ
Do I need to pay a maintenance fee if my patent application is still pending?
No. Maintenance fees only apply to patents that have already been granted. There’s nothing to pay while an application is still being examined.
Does the USPTO remind me before a maintenance fee is due?
The USPTO does send a courtesy reminder, but it isn’t a substitute for tracking these dates independently. The fee is still owed and the patent can still lapse whether or not that reminder is received or noticed in time.
Can I pay a maintenance fee early?
No. Each fee only becomes payable starting at the opening of its 6-month window before the due date. Paying ahead of schedule outside that window isn’t accepted.
Do design or plant patents have maintenance fees?
No. This three-payment structure applies only to utility patents. Design patents (14 or 15 years, depending on filing date) and plant patents (20 years from filing) don’t require maintenance fees at all.
What if my company’s entity size changes between payments, say, from small to large?
Entity size is determined as of each individual payment, so a company that grows from a small entity into a large one over the life of a patent pays the large-entity rate at whichever maintenance-fee deadline it no longer qualifies for the discount.
Who’s actually watching your due dates?
Here’s something most patent owners don’t realize: a lot of law firms don’t handle maintenance fees in-house at all. The patent issues, the file closes, and tracking those three payments over the next eleven and a half years becomes someone else’s problem, usually an outside annuity service, and sometimes nobody’s. We do it differently. Thompson Patent Law tracks maintenance fee deadlines on the patents we file, so the dates don’t depend on a reminder landing in the right inbox a decade from now. If you’re working with us, you already have people watching those windows, and if you have a question about where one of your patents stands, just ask.
