Fundamental of Patent Pendency and Its Calculation

Patent pendency is a measure of the amount of time a patent application is pending before a patent is issued. Average patent pendency is at USPTO is 27 months; with high-tech wait times nearly double that. Some inventors have waited 12 years before getting their patent grant. USPTO had a challenge to lower down this rate. Here we will discuss on it and how to calculate the patent pendency.

According to Patent and Trademark Office, "patent pendency is the period from the date when an application is filed until the date when a patent is issued or the application is abandoned". PTO computes average pendency as the total number of months for all patents issued or abandoned over a particular period, divided by the total number of applications for that period. Patent pendency is a primary measure of the delay in the processing time in granting patents.

The period is the total period from the filing date of a regular patent application to the date of issuance as a patent. Even though the filing of a "Provisional" has "Patent Pending" status, no portion of the one year before the regular patent application is filed should be included in your pendency calculations.

It is calculated by simply taking out the average time taken in the prosecution of the set of issued patents (i.e. the time between filing and grant of the patent). Before making final calculation we have to look on the borderline cases (i.e. cases having too long or too short prosecution time). Too long prosecution time may be due to unnecessary delay from the applicant's side, and such cases should be excluded from the calculations.

Patent pendency = Time lag between filing and grand of a patent

It is always better to take a bigger set of patents to calculate patent pendency for better answers.