Shira Perlmutter, Register of Copyrights, submitted a new fee schedule to Congress on 14 July 2026 under section 708(b) of Title 17. The transmittal letters to Vice President J.D. Vance and Speaker Mike Johnson state the mechanism plainly: the Register may institute the new fees 120 days after submission unless Congress enacts a law within that period saying it does not approve the schedule. The 120th day is 11 November 2026, which puts the earliest effective date at 12 November — the figure the Copyright Alliance also gave when it flagged the change on 13 October. Congress rarely passes a disapproval statute, so the schedule should be treated as effective rather than proposed. It is the first change to Copyright Office fees since 2020, and the Office puts the average increase at 43%, justified by roughly 33% of inflation since the last cost study and about 3% a year projected forward.
Registration is the part being reported, and it is the smaller part. The Single Application — one work, one author who is also the sole claimant, not a work made for hire — goes from $45 to $55. All other electronic filings go from $65 to $85. Paper Forms PA, SR, TX, VA and SE go from $125 to $185. Group registrations move further: short online literary works and 2D artwork both land at $130 (from $65 and $85), a group of published or unpublished photographs goes from $55 to $85, and a group of updates to news websites jumps from $95 to $275. Album groups split — musical works settle at $85, but sound recordings, photographs, artwork and liner notes double to $130. Two low-volume registrations rise hardest: a mask work goes from $150 to $650, and preregistration from $200 to $320.
The real increase is in recordation, not registration
For anyone managing an actual portfolio rather than a single work, the registration numbers are a rounding error and the recordation numbers are not. The base fee to record a document electronically goes from $95 to $215 — a 126% rise. Paper recordation of anything other than a termination notice goes from $125 to $350. Each additional transfer in a document recorded under 17 U.S.C. § 205 goes from $95 to $215. And the add-on that actually governs the cost of a real assignment — the fee covering 1 to 50 additional works or alternate identifiers beyond the single work in the base fee — goes from $60 to $215, a 258% increase. The 51-to-500 band moves from $225 to $300.
Stack those. A single assignment covering forty works, filed electronically, costs $95 plus $60 today. From 12 November the same filing costs $215 plus $215 — it goes from $155 to $430 for the identical document. Multiply that across a catalogue acquisition, a security interest over a software library, or a routine clean-up of employee-assignment paperwork that has been sitting unrecorded, and the increase is the kind of number that changes a budget line rather than a petty-cash entry. The Office’s own reasoning for pushing recordation above inflation is that these services are “typically used by commercial entities” with relatively inelastic demand, which is a candid way of saying it expects corporate filers to absorb it.
What to bring forward in the next four weeks
There are 29 days between this article and 12 November, and the saving is available only on documents actually submitted before the schedule turns over. Three categories are worth pulling forward now.
Unrecorded transfers. Most portfolios carry a backlog of executed assignments that were never recorded because recordation is voluntary and nothing forced the issue. Those are precisely the filings where the fee is discretionary in timing but the document already exists — the cheapest possible win. Recording under § 205 is what puts a transfer on the public record and fixes priority between conflicting transfers, so a backlog is a chain-of-title exposure as well as a cost. If the assignments and work-made-for-hire paperwork behind your deposits have not been reconciled against what is recorded, that reconciliation is a contract and chain-of-title management exercise with a hard 11 November price deadline attached.
Bulk and group filings. The group options are where the percentage increases are steepest, so a photographer, newsroom or music catalogue with a quarter’s worth of unregistered output is choosing between $65 and $130 per group filing, not between $65 and $85. Consolidate and file the backlog in October rather than January. The corollary for 2027 planning: when group fees roughly double, the calculation of how many works to bundle into each filing changes, and the habit of filing small, frequent groups becomes materially more expensive than batching to the eligibility limits.
Anything already on a clock. Notices of termination are the clearest case. Paper filing of Form TCS rises from $125 to $275, and because recordation is a condition of a termination notice taking effect within windows fixed by statute, this is a filing you cannot defer to avoid the fee — you can only file it earlier. The same logic applies to renewal claims (Form RE, $125 to $165) and to any registration you need in hand before suing, since registration is a precondition to a federal infringement action and to statutory damages and fees. Where litigation is contemplated, note that the expedited special-handling surcharge rises from $800 to $1,100 for a claim and from $550 to $1,100 for a recordation. Special handling on a deadline will cost $1,100 on top of the filing fee from November.
Due diligence gets more expensive too
One change that will not show up in a registration budget: Copyright Office search reports from official records rise from $200 to $300 per hour, with a two-hour minimum, and certification of Office records including search reports rises the same way, as does record retrieval. For transactional diligence on a catalogue — where the Office’s records are the authoritative source on recorded transfers — the floor cost of an official search goes from $400 to $600 before anyone reads the result. That is a reason to establish what the recorded position is as part of ongoing portfolio analysis, rather than discovering gaps at the point a buyer’s counsel orders a report under time pressure.
The Single Application survived — for now
The Office’s March 2026 notice of proposed rulemaking had proposed abolishing the Single Application outright, on the basis of high error rates, increased refusals and the administrative cost of applicants who misread its eligibility rules. Of 81 comments received — roughly three quarters from individuals — a number backed elimination, including AIPLA; the Copyright Alliance, the NMPA and the Authors Guild opposed it. The Office reversed, retaining the option with only the $10 inflation adjustment, leaving it about 30% cheaper than the Standard Application.
The reprieve is explicitly temporary. The Office states it does not expect to carry the Single Application into the Enterprise Copyright System registration platform now in development, while saying it will keep exploring alternative fee structures for individual creators. For a high-volume individual filer, that is the planning signal in this document: the cheap route to registering single-author works is a transitional arrangement with no stated end date, and the modelling for 2027 onward should assume the $85 standard fee, not $55. The reasons to register have not changed — the ability to sue, statutory damages and fees, the evidentiary presumption, and eligibility to participate in class settlements, which has already cost unregistered owners a place in AI-training litigation. What has changed is that the price of deferring goes up by 43% in four weeks.
Figures in this article are taken from the fee schedule and Appendix A of the Office’s proposal as submitted to Congress on 14 July 2026, linked below. The schedule had not yet taken effect at the time of writing; percentages are calculated from the current and proposed fees in that document. This is general information, not legal advice on any particular filing.