Sector dossier: who files, how long it takes, and who gets left behind
Every sector files differently, waits differently, and comes away with a patent at wildly different rates depending on who's filing.
Every sector, broken down
The whole-office figure isn't an average of the sectors below. Large and small filers simply work in different fields, and that skews the total.
Pick an industry and see who the US patent system is built for: how much of it belongs to big companies versus the small companies and independent inventors, how long each side waits, and how often small filers come away empty handed. Same office, very different odds depending on what you build.
How long it takes
Typical time from filing to the end, on the same scale for both endings. Half finish sooner, half later.
The wait is the one thing not stacked against small filers.
Small businesses don't wait longer than large companies here, on both clocks they finish sooner. Whether they get the patent is the next section.
The winning path
Time to a patent
Median wait of the applications that ended in a patent, measured on 413,960 of them in this sector.
The losing path
Time until they give up
Median time spent before abandoning, measured on the 79,262 applications given up in this sector.
How often small filers come away empty handed
Of the applications that reached a decision, how many ended in a patent?
Every 100 applications that reached a decision
No field spares the small filer
Each sector splits into the examining fields the Patent Office actually runs. Slice them any way you like: the gap holds in every field of every sector.
71 of 71
fields, small filers come away with fewer patents
The Patent Office runs 71 examining fields across these five sectors. Small filers end up with fewer patents per 100 decisions than big companies in every single one. The bands below show how wide that gap runs inside each sector.
Fewer patents per 100 decided applications · band = a sector's mildest field to its harshest · dot = the sector overall
Even Technology's mildest field costs small filers 8.7 patents per 100 decisions; its harshest costs 27.7. Click a sector to open its dossier.
About these numbers
Filer sizes are what filers declare to the patent office for its fee discount: large companies pay the full fee, small businesses half, micro entities (mostly individual inventors) a quarter. "Small filers" on this page means small businesses and micro entities together.
The gap is measured on applications that reached a decision: of every 100, how many ended in a patent for large companies, minus the same for small filers. "Likely between" is a 95% bootstrap interval.
The two clocks are each measured on a different set of applications, time to a patent only on the ones that got one, time before giving up only on the ones that didn't, so they are read together, with the number each was measured over:
| Filer | Time to a patent | Measured on | Time before giving up | Measured on |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Large companies | 2 years 1 month | 361,191 | 2 years 8 months | 56,493 |
| Small businesses | 2 years | 47,989 | 2 years 4 months | 19,440 |
| Micro entities | 1 year 10 months | 4,780 | 2 years 2 months | 3,329 |
The check re-measures the sector's gap with each of its fields held to a fixed share, to separate "small filers do worse within a field" from "small filers work in harder fields". For Technology it used 36 of 40 of the sector's fields, covering 100% of the sector's applications.
A sector is a bundle of the Patent Office's fields; the office publishes no industry grouping of its own. Technology is 40 fields, listed above. The 5 sectors cover 933,878 of the office's 934,421 applications; the other 543 sit in work the office handles separately (designs, re-examination and administrative filings).
The applications we tracked are US utility applications filed over three complete years and followed to their outcome. Applications that arrived through the international (PCT) route are excluded, so nothing here describes foreign filers. No figure on this page is an average of the figures below it; every level is its own measurement.
Source: USPTO published patent applications. One set of applications, grouped three ways: by sector, technology centre, and field.