$1.9 billion. Size the U.S. Patent Office budget. “The U.S. Patent and Trademark has an annual budget of about $1.9 billion.” (Diane Bartz, “U.S. patent office shortfall worsens: official,” Reuters, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 6:20pm EDT)
$1.4 billion. Size of the U.S. Patent Office. “Since George Washington signed the Patent Act of 1790, the office has struggled to keep up with the ever increasing speed of invention. Now part of the Department of Commerce, the USPTO [United States Patent and Trademark Office] is a $1.4 billion agency employing a staff of more than 6,000. In 1991, the office was overhauled, and a fee system was established to allow the agency to be self-supporting. But the very next year, Congress took one look at the juicy fees and withheld $8 million, putting it to other purposes. The diversion continued unabated, totaling $700 million in a decade.” (Megan Barnett, “Patents pending”, U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 2002)
$752 million. Amount of fees collected by the USPTO from patent applicants that have been siphoned off by Congress since 1992 to pay for unrelated federal projects. “For more than a dozen years starting in 1992, Congress siphoned off a total of $752 million in fees from the Patent Office to pay for unrelated federal projects, decimating the agency's ability to hire and train new examiners.” (John Schmid and Ben Poston of the Journal Sentinel, “Patent backlog clogs recovery,” A Journal Sentinel Watchdog Report, Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 15, 2009)
$5.9 million. Average daily fees collected by the U.S. Patent Office for the week of June 15th, 2009. “The patent office, which supports itself by collecting fees to grant and maintain patents, has seen its collections drop from $6.9 million a day in January and February of this year [2009] to $6.2 million per day in April and May, said Jay Reich, deputy chief of staff of the Commerce Department. Last week, collections totaled just $5.9 million a day, Reich told Reuters.” (Diane Bartz, “U.S. patent office shortfall worsens: official,” Reuters, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 6:20pm EDT)
Volume of Mail Received by the Patent Office
2 million. Number of pieces of mail per year received by the patent office. "We get over two million pieces of mail each year, and once in a while, we can have a mislaid paper.” (U.S. Patent Office spokeswoman Brigid Quinn quoted in Thuy-Doan Le, “Entrepreneurial spirit starts to pay off for Sacramento, Calif.-area inventor,” Sacramento Bee, December 12, 2004)
Number Patent Office Patent Examiners and Employees
6,285. Number of USPTO patent examiners. “The 6,285 patent examiners approve or reject about 450,000 applications each year, according to patent office figures.” U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). (Diane Bartz, “U.S. patent office shortfall worsens: official,” Reuters, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 6:20pm EDT)
6000. Number of staff employed at the USPTO. “Now part of the Department of Commerce, the USPTO is a $1.4 billion agency employing a staff of more than 6,000.” (Megan Barnett, “Patents pending”, U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 2002)
Patent Process Time (Hours Per Patent)
17 hours. Estimated amount of time that patent examiners spend on checking an inventor’s patent claims. “But the patents office is swamped. Patent examiners devote on average only 17 hours to checking an inventor's claim to some unique product, process or idea. They are working through a backlog of more than 400,000 patent claims.” (Jim Landers, “Trouble impending in patent process,” The Dallas Morning News, May 1, 2007)
25 hours. Average time it takes for an attorney to write a patent. “Once a patent lawyer has enough information about the invention, he or she files a patent application, which takes an average of 25 hours to write and costs about $10,000.” $10,000/25 hours = $400/hour. IP attorney fees. (Bob Wise, president of the Texas Inventors Association quoted in Erin Quinn, Tribune-Herald staff writer, “Making an invention idea a reality can be a hard road, Waco-Tribune Herald, Monday, December 10, 2007)
Wages and Salaries of Patent Office Employees
$69,899 - $90,866. Annual salary offered in 2010 by the USPTO for the position of patent examiner in an effort to help reduce the patent backlog. “With a backlog of more than 700,000 patent applications, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office needs all the help it can get. It'll have plenty to choose from - in response to a recent patent examiner vacancy announcement, the agency was flooded with more than 4,000 applications. The PTO will hire 250 of them, part of a push to reduce chronic backlog problems. It now takes about three years on average for a patent to issue. . . The [patent examiner] positions pay between $69,899 and $90,866 a year – no weekend of evening work expected. The bare qualitifactions: you must be a U.S. citizen, have a college degree in science or engineering, and be willing to work at the agency’s headquarters in Alexandria, Va.” (Jenna Greene, , “PTO Goes on a Hiring Spree in Effort to Reduce Patent Backlog,” Legal Times Blog, March 17, 2010)
$32,000. Starting salary of an examiner at the USPTO. “The diversion of patent fees has made it hard for the office to recruit and retain qualified examiners, whose salary scale starts at $32,000. Indeed, during the economic boom of the late '90s, the agency lost hundreds of examiners to the more lucrative private sector. In the year 2000 alone, 437 examiners left their jobs, while just 375 were hired. Yet between 1996 and 2000, patent applications grew over 50 percent. And the office was caught flat-footed when a federal court in 1998 upheld a patent for a computerized method of calculating share prices for mutual funds. Following the ruling, the patent office was flooded by applications for business methods, such as Amazon's controversial "one click" checkout system for online ordering. Short on M.B.A.'s, the office was forced to hire more business-qualified examiners. In an effort to attract them, the agency hiked salaries, instituted flexible work hours, and added graduate-school benefits. But it is still desperate to catch up.”( Megan Barnett, “Patents pending”, U.S. News & World Report, June 10, 2002)
