The European Patent Office's revised Programme for Accelerated Prosecution (PACE) has applied since 1 February 2026 to PACE requests filed on or after that date. Under the current rules PACE is available for the examination stage only, and requests for accelerated search are no longer accepted. A request must be made on the dedicated EPO Form 1005 and filed online; the EPO does not process requests made informally or on paper. As a rule only one PACE request may be filed per application during examination, and applicants who request acceleration for all or most of their applications will be asked to make a selection and limit the number of requests. The EPO has stated that Form 1005 is planned to become available in MyEPO in the course of 2026.
An application leaves PACE when the applicant requests an extension of a time limit, when the PACE request is withdrawn, or when the application is refused, withdrawn or deemed withdrawn, and it cannot be restored to the programme afterwards; accelerated prosecution is suspended if a renewal fee is not paid by the due date. The removal and suspension rules also apply, from the entry into force of the revised programme, to applications that were already in PACE. The EPO continues to aim to issue the next office action within about three months of receiving the applicant's reply. For Euro-PCT applications, a request for early processing on entry into the European phase is a separate mechanism from PACE: accelerated examination in the European phase is not performed unless a PACE request is filed separately. J&C recommends treating "no extension requests and renewal fees paid on time" as a firm internal rule for every PACE case, and checking on each Euro-PCT file that both the early-processing request and the PACE request have actually been filed.
