Our newest index
Patent Friction
Cost, time, independent inventors and foreign share, measured the same way at five patent offices, as one signed number: how far the United States sits from its peers.
5 patent offices · 4 pillars · 9.45M US patents read · 14.1M applications traced
Four-pillar composite · median parity
Zero is parity with the peer-office median. Negative means the US is the worse place to be a filer.
- Cost
- -21.39
- Second-dearest of five
- Time
- -61.45
- Slowest of five
- Independents
- -23.05
- Half the rate of South Korea
- Foreigners
- -64.59
- A majority of US grants go abroad
The composite against the peer-median parity line. Click through for the pillar-by-pillar breakdown.
The US patent system, one signed number
The Patent Friction Index asks four questions of the patent offices of the United States, Europe, China, Japan and South Korea: what a patent costs, how long it takes, whether an independent inventor gets in, and whose applicants the office serves. Each answer is scored inside the five-office panel, parity is the median of the four peers, and the composite is the plain mean of the four US distances. Against that line the United States sits at −42.62, and every pillar points the same way.
One yardstick, five offices
Each pillar is one quantity the offices publish, defined once and applied unchanged to all five. Where an office does not publish it, the cell stays empty rather than estimated.
The independent inventor, in full
The independents pillar opens onto the full US drill-down: grant-rate gaps by entity size, abandonment before a decision, and who is missing from the AI gold rush.
Every utility patent since 1976
The US measures come from the USPTO's own records: 9.45 million granted patents and 14.1 million examination records, recomputed in 111 automated checks.
The direction of travel
The number is moving the wrong way.
Two of the four pillars have annual histories. On both, the United States drifts further from its peers.
The US added 8.3 months of waiting in four years. Japan cut 2.4.
Months of waiting each office spares (+) or adds (−) against the peer-median line, 2021 to 2024.
The five offices start this clock at different events.
Source: WIPO World Intellectual Property Indicators 2025, Table A62.
American inventors have been a minority in US grants since 2008.
Domestic share of grants, 1991 to 2024.
South Korea is absent from this series. China's climb is denominator-driven: since 2016 its resident grants grew 210% while non-resident grants grew 4%.
Source: WIPO IP Statistics Data Center, patent grants by origin.