Patent Filing: Fees for Extra Pages and Claims

Published on 27 May 2016

In some patent jurisdictions around the world, the fee for filing a patent application includes a limited number of pages and claims (for example, 30 pages and 10 claims in India). Thus, if a patent application has extra pages and/or claims beyond what has been defined, the applicant is required to pay a fee for every extra page and/or claim. As an IP professional, it takes time and effort to determine such fees, which could constitute a high proportion of the total filing fees. This is where our software Global IP Estimator can be of immense help, as illustrated in the example below.

Let us consider a 100-page specification having 20 claims (of which three are independent claims) filed by a large entity, in the top twenty patent jurisdictions* in the world. For the purpose of this analysis, EPO member states have not been considered separately. An estimate of the total official and associate costs incurred in each country for electronic filing are depicted in Table 1.

Five out of the twenty jurisdictions have official fees for extra pages and/or claims (Table 2), of which four jurisdictions (CN, IN, MY, and UA) are classified as “developing countries” by the International Monetary Fund. In Mexico, which is another developing country, while there are no official fees for extra claims, there may be associate charges for claims in excess of ten.

Where there is an official fee involved, there is an associate fee also involved. The combined official and associate fees for the extra pages and claims can be quite high (Table 3).

Based on these costs, one can imagine how expensive it could be to file biotechnology and pharmaceutical patent applications that typically run into hundreds of pages. China and India, especially, are major markets for the biotech and pharma industries. In the United States, official fees are applicable for independent claims in excess of three, claims in excess of twenty, and pages in excess of a hundred.

Add to this, the fluctuation in exchange rates and the jurisdictions updating fees, it is vital to accurately predict these costs.

Want to simplify the process, benefit from our research, and have the costs accurately estimated in 30 seconds? Contact us right away!

Exchange Rates Used:

1 US Dollar = 1.31 Australian Dollars, 3.63 Brazilian Real, 1.3 Canadian Dollars, 6.5 Chinese Yuan, 0.88 Euros, 3.8 Israeli New Shekels, 66.3 Indian Rupees, 112.5 Japanese Yen, 1,150 Korean Won, 347 Kazakhstan Tenge, 17.3 Mexican Pesos, 4 Malaysian Ringgits, 1.5 NZ Dollars, 68.1 Russian Rubles, 3.8 Riyals, 1.4 Singapore Dollars, 26.6 Ukraine Hryvnia, and 15.1 South African Rands.

*- Top twenty patent jurisdictions taken from WIPO’s World IP Indicators 2015