Patent Center

Patent Center is available to all users for electronic filing and management of patent applications.

You may access an on-demand recording of a previous Patent Center Training session to learn more about filing and managing patent applications. Please see the Top 25 questions and answers from prior sessions held August 1, 2023 through November 2, 2023.

Patent Center Benefits

  • Filing and application management are incorporated within a single user interface for enhanced user experience
  • Uses the same USPTO.gov accounts and sponsorships that you used to log in to EFS-Web and PAIR
  • Submission of the specification, claims, abstract and drawings in a single DOCX document without the need to manually separate sections
  • Drag and drop interface allows filers to upload multiple files at once
  • Separate submission and payment receipts clearly confirms status of submitted documents and successful payments
  • Training mode is an interactive simulation where you can safely practice filing DOCX and PDF documents

What's new & coming soon

See what's new in our latest release and upcoming features coming soon to Patent Center.

 

Patent Center known issues and workarounds

The following limitations and known issues apply to the current Patent Center release:

 

Additional feedback currently in development

We are working on additional functionality that you have suggested, which will be available soon:

  • Displaying the attorney document number on the fee payment page
  • Filing an Assignment through Patent Center
  • Inventor name filter in the Workbench
  • Ability to remove a registration number from multiple customer numbers
  • Download documents indicator for Correspondence

For detailed explanations regarding the following suggestions, please visit the Patent Center FAQ's:

  • Can the inactivity time-out be extended?
  • Can Practitioner Support users sign and file ePetitions, eTDs, Web85b, and other submissions?
  • Can patent drawings be submitted in greyscale and color?
  • Can I get a combined Submission and Payment Receipt?

Patent Center Feedback

USPTO would like to thank our Patent Center Alpha, Beta and IdeaScale participants for using Patent Center and providing input for improvements! In response to your feedback, USPTO has implemented many of your suggestions for Patent Center, which include:

  • Improved system performance
  • Accepting multi-section DOCX files
  • Provided a workaround for electronic Plant application submissions
  • Facilitated document description selection with type ahead search of keywords
  • Storing Saved Submissions for 14 days
  • Increased the number of documents that can be filed in one submission to 100
  • Ability to switch between attorneys without having to re-authenticate
  • Searching by attorney docket number from the Patent Center sign-in page

Contact Information

We welcome your continued suggestions through email to the eMod mailbox; and participation on IdeaScale. All ideas are reviewed and considered weekly.

For questions, technical issues or troubleshooting, please contact the Patent Electronic Business Center at ebc@uspto.gov or 866-217-9197. Monday - Friday, 6 a.m. - 12 a.m. ET.