Type "how much does a patent cost" into Google and you will get a wall of law-firm pages telling you "it depends — contact us". The numbers are not actually private. They are publicly documented in the USPTO fee schedule and well-surveyed in attorney rate reports. Here's what they say.
The USPTO fees are the small part
A small-entity utility patent application pays $160 in basic filing fees, $350 search fee, $400 examination fee, and $600 issue fee — $1,510 total to get a patent issued. That is roughly 5% of the actual lifetime cost.
The other 95% is split across attorney fees and maintenance fees over 20 years.
Attorney fees scale with subject-matter complexity
Practitioner consensus from the AIPLA Economic Survey:
- Simple mechanical patent: $5,000–$10,000 to draft + file
- Software / business method: $8,000–$15,000
- Complex (biotech, semiconductor, ML): $12,000–$30,000
- Each office action response: $1,500–$7,500 depending on complexity
About 70% of utility patent applications face at least one office action. About 30% face two. Plan for 1–2 responses, not zero. A simple utility patent that goes through two office actions is realistically $10,000–$20,000 in attorney fees alone before the patent issues.
Maintenance fees decide what survives
After the patent issues, the USPTO charges maintenance fees at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years. For a small entity:
- 3.5 years: $1,000
- 7.5 years: $1,880
- 11.5 years: $3,850
Total: $6,730 over the patent's life. About a third of US patents are abandoned at the 7.5-year mark. About 70% are abandoned by year 11.5. This is rational behavior — most patents do not generate enough revenue to justify $3,850 every few years.
A patent's value is decided by what you do with it, not by the filing date. Abandoning maintenance on a non-commercial patent is the right move, not a failure.
PCT international defers the real money
A PCT (international) application costs around $4,000 in USPTO + WIPO fees plus $4,000–$10,000 in attorney work. That sounds expensive, but it is the cheap part of going international.
The expensive part is national stage entry — converting the PCT into actual patent applications in each country you care about. Each national stage filing is $3,000–$8,000 in local attorney fees and another $1,500–$5,000 in translation. Filing in EU + China + Japan + Korea is easily $20,000–$40,000 on top of the PCT.
PCT defers cost; it does not avoid it. The decision of which countries are worth committing to happens at the 30-month national stage deadline, when you have to write checks.
The honest 20-year total
A typical small-entity utility patent in the US, attorney-drafted, with 1–2 office actions, taken to year 11.5 with all maintenance paid:
- USPTO fees + maintenance: ~$8,200
- Attorney + drawings: ~$15,000–$25,000
- Total over 20 years: ~$23,000–$33,000
Add international (PCT + 4 national stages) and the lifetime cost is $50,000–$100,000+.
This is what law firms mean by "it depends". The range is wide, but it is bounded — and the bounds are knowable.
Our patent filing cost estimator computes this for your specific case: type, entity size, complexity, expected office actions, optional add-ons (RCE, prior art search, Track One expedite), and PCT path. The output is a year-by-year cost timeline with USPTO fees and attorney fees broken out separately, so you can see where the money goes.