Trademark Center Replaces TEAS: What Changes Before Your Next Deadline

Trademark Center is the USPTO’s replacement for the filing system you have probably used before, and by spring 2027 it is meant to be the only one. That timeline has held steady. What has not held steady is the schedule for retiring individual forms, and the forms moving next are the ones that carry deadlines you cannot miss.

If you own a registered mark, this is not an IT story. It is a docketing story.

What is actually changing

The USPTO has been migrating forms out of the Trademark Electronic Application System, or TEAS, and into Trademark Center in waves. Each form goes live in the new system, runs in both places for two to three months, and then disappears from TEAS.

Some of this is already done and most filers never noticed. New trademark applications have been Trademark Center only since January 18, 2025. International applications based on a US application or registration moved to WIPO’s Madrid e-Filing on October 1, 2026, and TEASi no longer accepts them.

The USPTO’s stated goal is that the whole transition will be complete in spring 2027. Nothing in the record suggests that has moved.

The dates have already moved three times

Here is the part worth paying attention to.

On June 25, 2026, the USPTO announced that the voluntary amendment form would retire from TEAS on August 1. On July 1, it announced that six maintenance and renewal forms would be discontinued on September 1. As of late September 2026, neither had happened, and the USPTO’s guidance now reads: “In late October, these forms will be retired from TEAS.”

Late October. No day.

That is three published dates for the same event in four months, and the current one is a two-week window rather than a date. If you are a registrant trying to work out whether to file through the old system or the new one, there is no schedule to plan against. The honest answer is to stop trying to time it and just move.

Which forms are moving, and why these ones matter

The six forms now queued to leave TEAS are the maintenance and renewal filings:

• Section 8 Declaration of Use or Excusable Nonuse
• Section 15 Declaration of Incontestability
• Combined Sections 8 and 9, the declaration of use plus renewal
• Combined Sections 8 and 15
• Section 71 Declaration of Use or Excusable Nonuse, for Madrid registrations
• Combined Sections 71 and 15

All six have been live in Trademark Center since July 2026. Two others sit on the retirement list with no announced date at all: the voluntary amendment form, and the Section 7 request to amend or correct a registration certificate.

These matter more than the application forms did, because of what happens when you miss one. A new application filed late is a new application filed late. A Section 8 declaration missed at the six-year mark cancels the registration outright.

The deadlines themselves have not changed:

• Section 8 falls between the fifth and sixth anniversaries of registration, with a six-month grace period at an extra $100 per class.
• Sections 8 and 9 together fall between the ninth and tenth anniversaries, then every ten years after that, same grace period.
• Section 15 is optional and can be filed within one year after any five-year period of continuous use.
• Section 71 works like Section 8 for registrations that came through the Madrid Protocol.

Current electronic fees are $325 per class for a Section 8, $325 for a Section 9 renewal and $250 for a Section 15. A combined Sections 8 and 9 renewal runs $650 per class, or $750 per class if you file in the grace period.

The identity verification trap

This is the part that actually catches people, and it has nothing to do with which form you use.

Filing through Trademark Center requires a USPTO.gov account with verified identity. Not a registered account. A verified one. The USPTO’s own language is that verification “is mandatory for USPTO.gov account holders to file through Trademark Center, TEAS, and TEASi.”

There are three ways to get verified, and they are not equivalent:

1. ID.me self-service, which needs a government ID and a selfie and typically takes under fifteen minutes.
2. ID.me video chat, which skips the selfie but waits on an agent.
3. A paper form, notarized and mailed to the USPTO, which takes two to three weeks to process after it arrives. Remote online notarization is not accepted.

If your ID does not scan cleanly, or your name on file does not match, or you simply cannot complete the online flow, you are on the two-to-three-week path. Someone with a Section 8 due in November who starts this in late October has already lost.

Two more things that surprise people. There are no company or entity accounts, so each person files under their own verified identity. And support staff need their own verification plus sponsorship by a verified US-licensed attorney before they can file on anyone’s behalf.

What does not carry over

Saved TEAS form data does not transfer into Trademark Center.

TEAS never stored your drafts on the USPTO’s servers in the first place. It let you download a portable data file at the validation page and upload it again later. That file is tied to the form version it came from, and the USPTO’s own guidance has always warned that an upgraded form can render a saved template unusable. A retired form is that problem in its final form.

So if you have a half-finished renewal sitting in a folder somewhere, waiting for a client signature or a specimen, treat it as notes rather than as a filing you can pick up later.

I could not find any USPTO guidance addressing what happens to an in-progress TEAS draft at the moment a form retires. That silence is worth respecting rather than testing.

What Trademark Center does differently

Most of the changes are improvements, but they are changes, and a workflow built around the old system will notice.

Drafts are stored in the cloud, autosave roughly every sixty seconds, and are kept for up to a year. Fees display in a running sidebar that updates as you add classes and goods, instead of appearing only at submission. There are three ways to sign rather than one: sign in the platform, upload a pre-signed declaration, or use an electronic signature. Navigation is non-linear, so you jump between sections from a dropdown rather than paging through.

Accounts are role-based, with separate roles for trademark owners filing on their own behalf, US-licensed attorneys, Canadian attorneys, support staff and TTAB interested parties. Each role has different privileges, and shared accounts do not work.

Trademark Center also adds a docketing view that tracks the status of applications filed through it. Note the limit in that sentence: applications filed through Trademark Center. Your older TEAS filings are not in there.

If your deadline lands in the middle of this

The USPTO’s instruction is blunt: “If you have a filing due today and the document cannot be filed via TEAS, you must use an alternative method of filing to ensure that the document is timely received by the USPTO.”

Paper filing is available, but it is narrow. It is permitted during a posted USPTO outage, an unexpected widespread outage, or a widespread disastrous event, and outside an unexpected outage it requires a petition plus the petition fee and any paper surcharges. Faxed submissions are no longer accepted at all.

One detail inside that worth knowing before you need it. If you mail a paper filing through USPS with a certificate of mailing on the cover sheet, your filing date is the date you signed and mailed it. If you use a courier, your filing date is the date the USPTO receives it. On a deadline, that difference decides whether you made it.

What does not exist is any transition-specific relief. There is no safe harbor because a form moved, no grace because you could not find the new version. Sections 8, 9 and 71 deadlines are set by statute, and the USPTO cannot waive them for its own IT schedule.

What this means if you own a registered mark

If your next maintenance deadline is more than a year out, this is a note to yourself: verify your account, and check it again when the deadline gets close.

If your next deadline is inside six months, do three things this week. Confirm your USPTO.gov account is verified rather than merely created. Confirm the same for anyone who files for you. Then file early, because the only reliable protection against a platform problem is not being at the edge of the window when it happens.

And if you are looking at a registration you are not certain you should renew at all, that is a different and better question than which form to use. Registrations covering goods you stopped selling carry their own risk, because the declaration is signed under penalty of perjury.

FAQ

Do I have to use Trademark Center now, or can I keep using TEAS?

It depends on the form. New applications and international applications are already Trademark Center and Madrid e-Filing only. The maintenance and renewal forms are available in both systems until the USPTO retires them from TEAS, which it currently says will happen in late October 2026.

Will my trademark deadline move because the system is changing?

No. Section 8, 9 and 71 deadlines are statutory. The USPTO has not announced any transition relief, and it does not have the authority to waive a statutory deadline because a form moved.

How long does identity verification take?

The online route is usually under fifteen minutes. The notarized paper route takes two to three weeks after the USPTO receives your form. Plan on the slow one.

Can my paralegal file for me?

Yes, with their own verified account plus sponsorship by a verified US-licensed attorney. There are no shared or entity accounts.

What happens to a renewal I started in TEAS but did not finish?

Assume you are starting over in Trademark Center. TEAS saved form data as a local file tied to a specific form version, and there is no USPTO guidance promising those files will work after a form retires.

Is there any penalty for skipping a Section 15 declaration?

No. Section 15 is optional. Incontestability is worth having, but nothing is cancelled if you never file it.

Why this is worth a conversation

Most of what is above is calendar work, and a careful business owner can do calendar work. The part that is not calendar work is deciding what a maintenance filing should actually say. A Section 8 declaration is signed under penalty of perjury and lists the goods and services you are still using the mark on, which means the honest answer is sometimes narrower than the registration you are holding.

Getting that wrong exposes the whole registration, and getting it right sometimes means voluntarily deleting classes you paid for. That judgment, and the question of whether a registration is still worth maintaining at all, is what a trademark attorney is for. It is a better conversation to have three months before the deadline than three weeks after a cancellation notice.

The attorney work described above begins if you engage the firm. The first step is simpler than that. A Complimentary Trademark Needs Assessment is a conversation with one of our IP Intake Specialists about your mark, your goals, and where you are in the process, with no cost and no obligation. If you move forward, our attorneys build the clearance and filing strategy.