The stretch between paying the issue fee and seeing the patent grant has roughly doubled at the USPTO. Writing on Patently-O on 25 October 2026, Dennis Crouch reports that for utility patents issued in the first half of 2026 the median wait from fee payment to grant was 29 days; for patents issued between 1 September and 20 October 2026 the median was 60 days, with almost nothing issuing inside four weeks of payment.
The cause, on that account, is an efficiency gain that outran the step behind it. The Office reworked how it handles notices of allowance early this year, cutting processing from about 25 minutes per application to roughly 6, and in April used the new speed to clear its allowance-notice backlog — about 17,000 notices in a single week, some two and a half times the usual number. Issue fees are payable within three months, so the payments arrived together in a July wave. The Office of Patent Publication, meanwhile, kept issuing around 6,000 utility patents a week, and the pile of paid-but-unissued applications grew from its usual ~28,000 to a peak of about 54,000 in early October. Patently-O puts it now at roughly 51,000, slowly shrinking, with the Office readying over 7,000 patents a week and the queue unlikely to clear before early 2027.
The copendency window got longer, and less predictable
The deadline this moves first is the one nobody gets a second run at. Under 35 U.S.C. 120, a later application takes the benefit of an earlier filing date only if it is filed before the patenting or abandonment of the earlier application. The operative date is the issue date, and that date just drifted a month further out on the median.
The temptation is to read that as breathing room. It is not, because a median is not a schedule. The same queue that pushed the typical wait to 60 days is now being worked down at over 7,000 patents a week, which means the distribution is moving while you plan against it; an application pulled early issues on the old timetable, and the continuation that was going to be filed “sometime before grant” never gets filed. The safe practice has not changed, it has only become more obviously correct: decide the continuation question at or before the issue-fee payment, docket the issue notification as the hard date, and treat the median as a statistic rather than a deadline.
After the fee is paid, there are exactly three exits
A longer queue is not slack in the file. 37 CFR 1.313(c) allows an application to be withdrawn from issue on the applicant’s petition, once the issue fee is paid, for only three reasons: unpatentability of one or more claims — which requires an unequivocal statement to that effect, an amendment to the claim or claims, and an explanation of how the amendment makes them patentable; consideration of a request for continued examination complying with § 1.114; or express abandonment, which may be in favour of a continuing application. 1.313(d) then adds the sting: the petition is not effective unless it is actually received and granted before the date of issue. You are racing a date the Office controls and you cannot see.
Rule 1.313(a) marks the cheaper side of the same line: no petition under the rule is needed where an RCE under § 1.114 is filed before the issue fee is paid. The asymmetry between the two sides of the payment date is the whole planning point. Everything is routine before it and a petition afterwards.
Two extra months is, above all, an IDS problem
37 CFR 1.97(d) closes the ordinary IDS route at payment: a statement filed after the earlier windows is considered only if it is filed on or before payment of the issue fee, with the certification under 1.97(e) and the fee under § 1.17(p). Doubling the post-payment wait doubles the exposure that matters here — the stretch in which a counterpart office issues a search report or a sibling application turns up art, with the gate already shut and a duty of candour still running.
The answer is QPIDS, which the USPTO describes as fully implemented on a permanent basis. It removes the need to process an RCE in order to have an IDS filed after payment of the issue fee considered; where the examiner finds that no item in the statement necessitates reopening prosecution, the Office issues a corrected notice of allowability. It runs on form SB/09. In a 60-day queue, the right posture is to docket the issue-fee payment date as an IDS cut-off in its own right, keep foreign-counterpart results flowing to the US file through to grant, and have the QPIDS submission ready rather than assembled under pressure. Teams that want that sequencing handled as a tracked event rather than a diary note can see how we structure it in patent docketing, and the paperwork side in our IDS form generator.
Patent term: watch the four-month line, not the median
Under 35 U.S.C. 154(a)(2), the term begins on the date the patent issues and ends 20 years from the US filing date, so every week in the publication queue is enforceable life spent rather than deferred. The statutory counterweight is 154(b)(1)(A)(iv): the term is extended one day for each day the Office fails to issue a patent within four months after the date on which the issue fee was paid and all outstanding requirements were satisfied, subject to the limitations in paragraph (2) — no double-counting of overlapping delay, nothing beyond a disclaimed date, and reductions for applicant delay.
A 60-day median sits comfortably inside four months, so the typical case earns nothing from this clause. The tail is the story. With roughly 51,000 applications sitting paid-and-unissued and the pile draining slowly into 2027, applications that cross the four-month line accrue adjustment day for day. For anything issuing out of this queue — particularly families where term is doing real commercial work — the PTA figure printed on the face of the patent is worth recalculating rather than accepting, and the window to contest it is short.
What to change now
Make the continuation decision a gate on issue-fee payment, not a task in the weeks after it. Keep counterpart search results routed to the US file right through to grant, with QPIDS pre-drafted for anything that lands late. If a claim problem surfaces after payment, move on 1.313 immediately, because the petition must be granted, not merely filed, before issue. And tell clients planning launches, financings or enforcement around a grant date that the date has moved and is still moving: the Office is working the queue down, which makes both an early issue and a four-month-plus wait live possibilities for the same application.