How Much Does a Trademark Cost? (2026 Fees Explained)

Written by Mary Liberty, licensed U.S. trademark attorney. Updated July 2026 · 7 min read

"How much does a trademark cost?" is the question I get most, and the honest answer is: it depends on who you ask and what they are counting. The number you see advertised is almost never the number you pay. Let me break down every dollar that actually goes into a federal registration, where the surprise fees hide, and how to keep the total predictable.

Every trademark cost has two separate parts

Blur these two together and you will be confused by every quote you get. There is the government fee, paid to the USPTO, and the legal fee, paid to whoever prepares your application. They are set by different people for different reasons, and only one of them is negotiable.

The government fee is fixed by federal regulation. As of the 2025 fee structure, the USPTO charges a base filing fee of $350 per class of goods or services. File in one class, pay it once. File in three, pay it three times. This money is non-refundable the moment you hit submit — even if your application is later refused. No attorney can waive it, discount it, or make it disappear.

The legal fee is what varies wildly, and it is where you should focus your attention. This is the amount you pay a person or service to do the work: search the mark, choose the classes, draft the description, file correctly, and handle what comes next.

Why legal fees are all over the map

Walk down the market and you will see three tiers. At the bottom, form-filling services advertise eye-catching numbers — sometimes $0 plus fees. What you are buying there is data entry: they type what you give them into TEAS and file it. If the USPTO pushes back, you are on your own, or you pay again for "add-on" help. At the top, traditional law firms bill by the hour, and a straightforward registration can run $1,500 to $2,000+ once you count the search, the filing, and the correspondence.

In the middle — where I have deliberately placed MARQ — is the flat-fee attorney model. Our legal fee is $499, a real U.S. trademark attorney does the work, and the USPTO fee is billed at cost with zero markup. No hourly meter, no surprise invoices, no upsell theater.

Estimate your all-in cost

For most single-product businesses filing in one class with an attorney, the realistic all-in number is your legal fee plus $350. Add a class and add $350. Add the optional search report and add $49. Use the estimator to see your own number:

The costs that catch people off guard

The sticker price is rarely the finish line. Here is where extra money tends to appear, and how to see it coming:

Extra classes. The most common surprise. You thought you were selling one thing; you are actually selling three categories of thing. Each class is another $350 government fee. This is a real cost, not a gotcha — but a good search conversation surfaces it before you file, not after.

Description surcharges. Under the 2025 fee rules, writing your own free-form description instead of using the USPTO's pre-approved Trademark ID Manual entries triggers a $200-per-class surcharge, and long custom descriptions cost even more. Filing with accepted language keeps you at the base $350.

Office actions. If the USPTO raises an issue, you respond or the application dies. A procedural response runs $499 with us; a substantive legal refusal like likelihood of confusion runs $999 because it requires a written legal argument. Not every application gets one — a solid clearance search is the best way to avoid the substantive kind.

Statement of Use. If you filed intent-to-use, you pay a fee later to prove you have started selling, and possibly for extensions if you need more time.

Is registration worth the money?

Think of it against the alternative. A federal registration gives you nationwide rights, a public record that deters copycats, the ® symbol, the ability to enroll in Amazon Brand Registry, and a genuine legal weapon if someone infringes. Rebranding after you have built traction — new packaging, new domain, lost SEO, reprinted everything — routinely costs tens of thousands of dollars. A few hundred dollars up front to make sure the name is yours is not an expense; it is the cheapest risk management in your business.

Don't forget the cost of keeping it alive

Registration is not "file once, done forever." A federal trademark has upkeep deadlines, and missing one can cancel a mark you spent years building. Between the 5th and 6th year after registration you file a Section 8 declaration confirming you are still using the mark. Between the 9th and 10th year you file a combined Section 8 and Section 9 renewal, and then again every ten years after that. Each filing carries its own USPTO fee (currently $325 per class for the Section 8, plus the renewal fee), so budget a few hundred dollars per decade to keep protection in force.

These are small numbers compared to the value of an established brand, but they are real dates on a calendar. This is one quiet advantage of working with an attorney or a monitoring service: someone is watching those deadlines so a paperwork lapse never quietly erases your rights. Our monitoring service tracks both maintenance dates and new conflicting filings.

The most expensive option is the one that fails

Here is the math founders miss. A DIY filing that gets refused does not just cost the $350 you already spent — it costs the months you waited, the priority date you may have lost to a competitor who filed correctly in the meantime, and often a second $350 fee to refile. I have taken over more than one file where someone paid a cheap service, drew a refusal they did not know how to answer, let the application go abandoned, and came to me a year behind where they started.

The cheapest path to a registered trademark is almost never the lowest sticker price. It is the filing that is done right the first time, so you pay the government once and get to registration without a detour. That is the entire argument for the flat-fee attorney model: a slightly higher legal fee up front buys you a dramatically lower chance of paying twice.