Utility Patents Granted per Calendar 12 months, 1840-2022

By Jason Rantanen

I’m on the point of train my Fall 2023 Patent Regulation class, and meaning updating the granted utility patents graph that I do each few years.  This 12 months’s model exhibits U.S. utility patents granted per 12 months from 1840-2022:

Information for 2023 isn’t included within the desk, however as of July 25, 2023, the authority file comprises simply 171,556 patents.  If the tempo stays the identical, that will work out to about 294,000 patents granted this calendar 12 months–round 10% fewer than 2022 (327,482 granted patents) and round 18% decrease than 2020 (356,640 granted patents). (In distinction, on the finish of July 2022 there have been 186,500 patents listed on the Authority file.) However my sense is that the drop from 2022 could also be resulting from a delay in really publishing the granted patents quite than reflecting a decline.

Actually, wanting on the USPTO’s reported statistics, I’d really count on extra issued patents in 2023 than in 2022.  Filings are persevering with to development barely upwards (there have been 457k non-RCE UPR filings in FY 2022, as in contrast with 450k in FY 2020 and 427k in FY 2018). Allowances are up barely as effectively: 253k allowances to date in 2023, as in contrast with 247k on the identical level in 2022. So the lower in granted patents relative to final 12 months could also be the results of a delay between allowance and publication. In case you have any insights into this, I’d love to listen to them.

One factor that does look like actual is a drop in allowances relative to 202o, which had 278k allowances by the top of June. This doesn’t look like the results of fewer purposes or a decrease allowance charge–as a substitute, there’s been a big progress within the unexamined software stock from 570k (June 2020) to 735k (June 2023).

Methodology:

I imported the 2023-07-25 Patent Grant Authority file into STATA and tabulated the variety of A1, B1 and B2 type code information by 12 months.  (For individuals who is perhaps confused by way of A1, the authority file makes use of A1 to point pre-2001 utility patent grants).  I included patents which might be marked as Withdrawn.  The above graph makes use of calendar years (Jan. 1 – Dec. 31) as a substitute of FY (fiscal years: Oct 1 to Sept. 30).  To foretell 2023, I divided the grants as of the 7/25 by 7, then multiplied by 12; the quantity is analogous if weeks are used. Information on filings and allowances comes from the detailed spreadsheet on the backside of https://www.uspto.gov/dashboard/patents/.