Filings Up, Pendency Down – USPTO 2024 Year in Review (& Early Thoughts for 2025)

With 2024 now in the rearview mirror, it’s a great time to take a look at the past year’s U.S. trademark prosecution and examination numbers – and consider where the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) may be heading for 2025.

2024 was another eventful year for the USPTO, including an ever-growing volume of trademark filings. According to the USPTO’s trademarks data visualization center, nearly 205,000 trademark applications were filed in Q1 2025 (representing October through December 2024), with over 156,000 registrations issued.

The number of trademark filings represents a nearly 11% increase over the previous accounting period, continuing the significant filing volume that has been relatively consistent since 2020. In FY 2024 overall, the USPTO received nearly 765,000 trademark applications – about 4% more than FY 2023’s 737,000 but slightly less than 2022’s 788,000 (and far less than 2021’s ballooned 943,000 filings).

It is also interesting to consider annual trends on the filing bases for these hundreds of thousands of applications. As seen in the data visualization center’s table below, U.S. use-based applications under §1(a) of the Lanham Act overtook intent-to-use (“ITU”) filings under §1(b) in 2024, with that trend becoming even more significant in Q1 2025 – with 45% of filings under §1(a) and 39% under §1(b). This could be an economic reflection, showing that businesses are increasing their federal protection for trademarks that are already in use in U.S. commerce. It could also reflect a continuation of the trend seen in past years, where large volumes of Chinese applicants file (potentially fraudulent) single-Class use-based applications for consumer products sold in online marketplaces.

With regard to applications based on a foreign application or registration under the Paris Convention (§ 44 of the Lanham Act) or Madrid Protocol (§ 66), Madrid Protocol filings still have a slight lead – but overall, these applications make up less than 20% of U.S. applications.

Now, given how many applications are filed, how is the USPTO doing on its pendency goals? Some good news – the USPTO’s “first-action pendency,” or the average number of months from an application’s filing date to the first examination action (typically, an Office Action or publication approval), exceeded the Office’s goals in 2024, decreasing from 8.2 months to 7.5 months. First-action pendency is continuing to improve as we move into 2025, with the average dropping even further to 6.1 months in Q1 2025. However, it remains to be seen whether this downward trend will increase in light of anticipated federal workforce cuts.

This improved trademark examination efficiency, combined with the increase in filings, has resulted in an ever-growing U.S. federal Register – clocking in at over 3.3 million federal trademark registrations as of Q1 2025.

2025 is already looking like another robust year for the USPTO, and it will be interesting to see how political and economic developments impact the federal trademark system, and what it means for brand owners.