A nonprovisional patent application costs between $455 to $15,000. At the lower cost point, you have to prepare and file the nonprovisional patent application yourself without help from a patent attorney. But, the quality of your nonprovisional patent application may be low. For a higher-quality application, you can hire an experienced patent attorney. The cost for a professionally drafted nonprovisional patent application by a patent attorney will be between $2,500 to $15,000.
The cost for a provisional patent application will be about $75 to $15,000.
How much does a nonprovisional patent application prepared by a patent attorney cost?
The cost for a nonprovisional patent application prepared by a patent attorney will be between $7,000 to $14,000. You can get quotes much lower and higher than this from patent attorneys. However, nonprovisional patent applications lower than $7,000 will be of poor quality.
How do i know? I’ve transferred in my fair share of patent application from patent attorneys that have charged cheap rates. The quality of the patent application is typically suboptimal.
Nonprovisional patent applications that cost above $14,000 are from large law firms whose quality is the same as those costing between $7,000 and $14,000.
What are the benefits of hiring a patent attorney for the nonprovisional patent application?
The benefits of hiring a patent attorney for the nonprovisional patent are:
- broader patent coverage; and
- future proofed nonprovisional patent application.
The way to achieve these benefits is to focus on the point of novelty and include the minimally viable product, options, and variants. Patent attorneys should know the process of adding these things in the patent without unduly narrowing the description of your invention.
How much does a self-prepared nonprovisional patent application cost?
A self-prepared cost of a nonprovisional patent application consists of two components.
- USPTO fees, and
- drawing fees.
The total cost for a self-prepared nonprovisional patent application will be between $555 and $2,580.
Below is a list of the USPTO fees based on the entity size of the applicant.
| Micro Entity | Small entity | Large entity | |
| Basic filing fee | $80 | $80 | $80 |
| Utility search fee | $175 | $350 | $700 |
| Utility examination fee | $200 | $400 | $800 |
| Total | $455 | $830 | $1,580 |
The drawings for a nonprovisional patent application will cost between $100 and $800. Computer-drawn figures for the nonprovisional patent application are crucial. Otherwise, the examiner will object to the drawings and slow down the progress of the patent application.
Will submitting a self-prepared nonprovisional patent application save you money?
A self-prepared patent application may save you money in the short term. However, in the vast majority of cases that I’ve seen, the inventor does not save money.
First, many patent applications which are poorly drafted cannot be salvaged. For example, narrowly described inventions cannot be fixed later. You typically have one shot at getting it right.
Second, patent attorneys have to spend an extraordinary amount of time fixing your mistakes. They have to work with the patent application which you wrote and can’t change anything in your self-prepared patent application.
How much does it cost to upgrade a provisional to a nonprovisional patent application?
The cost to upgrade a provisional patent application to a nonprovisional patent application depends on the amount of information you loaded into the provisional patent application. Typically, lower-cost provisional patent applications have less information than higher-priced provisional patent applications.
The cost to upgrade a lower-cost provisional patent application to a nonprovisional patent application will be around $8,000 to $15,000. Lower-cost provisional patent applications are typically skimpy. They require a lot of work to include the details that should have been included in the provisional patent application. As such, the cost to upgrade from a lower-cost provisional patent application to a full-up nonprovisional patent application will be equal to a full write-up of the nonprovisional patent application.
The cost to upgrade a higher-priced provisional patent application to a nonprovisional patent application will be around $1,500. These higher-priced provisional patent applications are typically drafted as full-up nonprovisional patent applications. These higher-priced provisional patent applications should include a full claim set and computerized drawings that don’t require any further work. Not much more work is needed to file the nonprovisional patent application.
How much will the granted patent cost?
The nonprovisional patent application will be examined. Generally, you will spend between $1,000 to $10,000 to have your patent attorney argue the case before the examiner to get your patent granted and $1,000 to $2,000 for the issue fee.
The total patent cost for the will be between $9,000 to $25,000.