Federal Trademark Registration (USPTO)

What Can Actually Be Trademarked

A trademark is whatever a customer uses to tell your product or service apart from a competitor's. Usually it's a name. Sometimes it's a logo, a tagline, a packaging look — even a sound (the THX boom) or a color (UPS brown) in narrow cases. What it is not is a description of what you sell. "Apple" is a trademark for computers because it tells you who made the computer; "apple" is generic for fruit because it tells you what the fruit is. That line — source-identifying versus descriptive — is where most application fights are won or lost.

The four categories worth knowing:

• Word marks — your brand name in plain text. Broadest protection because it covers any font, style, or color you use the name in.
• Design marks — your stylized logo, exactly as drawn. Narrower than a word mark; you're protecting the visual, not the words.
• Taglines and slogans — short phrases used as brand identifiers. Harder to clear; the USPTO routinely refuses ones that read as merely descriptive or laudatory.
• Trade dress — packaging or product look. Rare, and only registrable when the look has acquired distinctiveness in the market.

What trademark won't do: protect an invention (that's a patent), a piece of writing or code (copyright), or a way of running a business (trade secret, sometimes). If a competitor is copying your name, trademark is the right tool. If they're copying your product, it isn't.

TM Symbol vs. Federal Registration

You can put TM on anything you're using as a brand identifier. No filing, no fee. It's a public claim, not a right. Anyone else can do the same on the same mark in a different region until somebody actually goes to court over it. Federal registration on the USPTO's principal register flips that asymmetry in your favor:

• Nationwide constructive notice. Once your mark is registered, everyone in the US is legally presumed to know about it. This prevents others from claiming they adopted a similar mark in good faith after your registration date, even in markets where you aren't yet actively selling.
• Right to use ® symbol. Only federally registered trademarks may use the ® symbol. Using ® on an unregistered mark is a federal offense.
• Federal court jurisdiction. Registration gives you the right to sue infringers in federal court, where remedies including statutory damages, attorney fees, and injunctions are available.
• Customs recordation. You can record your registration with US Customs and Border Protection to block the importation of counterfeit goods bearing your mark.
• Prima facie evidence of ownership. After five years, a registration can become "incontestable," creating a conclusive presumption of ownership that is very difficult for competitors to challenge.
• Basis for foreign registrations. A US federal registration can be used as a priority basis for trademark applications in other countries through international treaty systems.

The Search — Run It or Lose the Filing Fee

Most rejected applications die for the same reason: the applicant didn't search. The USPTO examiner has every registered and pending mark in the country in front of them, and if your mark looks confusingly similar to one already on file in a related class, the application comes back with a Section 2(d) refusal. The government fee is gone. A substantive response is a separate $299 piece of work and isn't a sure thing. The whole exercise is avoidable by running a real search up front.

Our clearance pass covers:

• Full-text USPTO database search for identical and similar marks in the relevant and related classes
• Common-law search across state business registries, domain names, and web presence for unregistered marks already in use
• Design Search Code lookup for logo applications, so we catch visual conflicts a plain-text search misses

The deliverable is a written summary with a risk read — green, yellow, or red. If we hit a red, we say so before the application is filed, and we walk you through whether to narrow the goods and services, modify the mark, or pick a different name entirely. Filing into a known conflict is a bad use of $599.

The Base Fee, Classes, and the Path Through Examination

The USPTO's 2025 fee restructure retired the TEAS Plus / TEAS Standard split on January 18, 2025 and merged both into a single base application at $350 per class, filed through the USPTO's Trademark Center. The catch: the $350 base assumes you use ID Manual goods-and-services language, keep the description under 1,000 characters, and include every required disclaimer at filing. Free-form descriptions or missing basic info trigger surcharges of $100–$200 per class. We file every application against the ID Manual by default to stay on the base fee. (More on the 2025 fee restructure.)

Classes are the 45 buckets the USPTO sorts everything into. Class 25 is clothing. Class 41 is education and entertainment. Class 35 covers retail and business services. Our base fee covers one. A brand that sells both a software product and merchandise will typically need two classes — Class 9 plus Class 25 — and that's an additional $350 USPTO government fee per added class on top of our preparation work.

After filing, you wait. The examiner picks the application up about 3–6 months in and either approves it for publication, issues an Office Action, or both in sequence. If it publishes, there's a 30-day window during which any third party can file an opposition (most don't). Clean applications from filing to registration certificate run 8–12 months. Applications that hit a substantive Office Action or a contested opposition run longer — sometimes 18–24 months. The application doesn't lose its priority date during any of that; you're protected from the filing day forward.

What's Included

Frequently Asked Questions