The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has published a final rule that will take effect on 13 August 2026 and apply to petitions filed on or after that date. Requests involving abandoned patent applications, patents expired for non-payment of maintenance fees, delayed priority or benefit claims, and certain missed Hague international design deadlines will face added scrutiny once the delay exceeds one year. Petitioners will need to explain the circumstances in detail and show that the entire period of delay was unintentional; the previous threshold for this additional showing was two years.
The rule does not remove the possibility of reinstatement or increase the existing fee amounts, but it moves both the higher petition-fee tier and the more demanding evidentiary threshold forward by a full year. In practice, one year now becomes a sharper risk boundary. Rights holders should review abandoned files, maintenance-fee lapses and broken priority chains early, while preserving docket records, internal correspondence, staffing changes and the timeline of corrective action. A petition assembled long after the event is far harder to support with a coherent record.
