Weekly Chart 18: Analysis of Allowance Rates for the USPTO Tech Centers
This week at Patexia, our Data Science Team analyzed over 7 million patent applications and reviewed the allowance rates for the USPTO examiners over the past several years.
We identified the most active USPTO Technology Centers and their average allowance rates. We learned that while TC 2800 (Semiconductors, Electrical and Optical Systems and Components) with 1.27 million applications has been the most active Technology Center, TC 2900 (Designs) has had the highest allowance rate (99 percent).
We also calculated the allowance rates for the USPTO and each of the Technology Centers and identified the number of pending applications for each of the Technology Centers.
For this analysis, we used the USPTO Patent Examination Research Dataset which contains detailed information on 9.2 million publicly viewable patent applications filed with the USPTO through end of March 2016. Out of 7,604,982 applications we reviewed, only 5,298,206 had issued and about 1,518,232 had been abandoned. This is approximately equivalent to 78 percent allowance rate on average for all applications. As of March there were still 788,533 applications pending.
Out of nine Technology Centers, Semiconductor and Electronics is the most active one with 1.27 million applications followed by Mechanical Engineering with 916 thousand applications. However, backlogs varies for different tech centers. For example, TC 2900 (Designs) has the lowest number of pending applications (almost up to date with only 364 applications pending) while TC 3700 (Mechanical Engineering) with about 148 thousand applications has the highest number.
| TC | Tech Centers | No. Art Units | Applications | Backlog |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1600 | Biotechnology | 63 | 601,453 | 79662 |
| 1700 | Chemical Engineering | 82 | 795,893 | 114920 |
| 2100 | Computer Architecture | 87 | 516,875 | 68219 |
| 2400 | Computer Networks | 85 | 403,360 | 79727 |
| 2600 | Communications | 90 | 732,924 | 72673 |
| 2800 | Semiconductors | 84 | 1,275,525 | 129319 |
| 2900 | Designs | 20 | 500,930 | 364 |
| 3600 | Transportation | 86 | 736,001 | 105192 |
| 3700 | Mechanical Engineering | 65 | 916,100 | 148208 |
Allowance rates also varies significantly from one tech center to another one. While TC 2900 (Design) will 99 percent has by far the highest rate of allowance, TC 1600 (Biotechnology) with 61 percent allowance rate seems to be at the bottom.
We recently launched our Examiner database under Patexia Research platform which provides statistical information about all USPTO examiners. This database is currently in Beta Release under Patexia Examiner Page. You can search over 15,000 patent examiners and view their performance individually and compare them with their Art Unit or USPTO overall performance. You can also view the top 25 examiners with the highest allowance rates as well as the top 25 examiners with the lowest allowance rates. These lists have been constructed based on a subset of examiners who are currently employed by the USPTO and have examined more than 490 applications which is the average number of applications examined by all examiners at the USPTO.
In the following weeks, we are going to expand this study and further investigate the activity and allowance rates over time to see if we observe any significant changes in the rates in different Art Units as patent system has been going through some changes in recent years (e.g., introduction of PTAB or Alice Decision).
We are also going to review the allowance rates for different Art Units at multiple points such as before and after the first final rejection to see if there is any significant variation. Our data science team is also capable to calculate these statistics for a particular company, law firm or group of attorneys.