Backlog of unexamined patent applications
the amount of patent applications at any given time which have been applied for, but remain to be examined
Although not clearly defined, the backlog of unexamined patent applications consists, at one point in time, of all the patent applications that have been filed and still remain to be examined. The backlog was said to be 4.2 million worldwide in 2007, and in 2009 it reportedly continued to grow. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) alone had a backlog of ca. 700,000 patent applications in 2009. By May 22, 2024 this number grew to 783,134 applications.
Although the overall economic effect of long patent examination time has not been reliably estimated, recent statistical studies found that patent grant delays have a stronger damaging effect on startups than on established companies. In particular, such delays reduce a startup's employment and sales growth, chances of survival, access to external capital, and future innovation. What is more surprising is that the delays also harm the growth, access to external capital, and follow-on innovation of the patentee's rivals.
Analysis
The USPTO experienced problems with a backlog of unexamined applications, a shortage of skilled examiners and loss of capable examiners to the better-paying private sector since its earliest days in the 1800s. As early as 1940s the backlog of unexamined patent applications, the shortage of examiners and insufficiency of the payments collected by the USPTO to cover its expenses were recognized as persistent USPTO's problems.
“Backlog of unexamined patent applications” enters the record as the amount of patent applications at any given time which have been applied for, but remain to be examined. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Backlog, unexamined and patent can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4839691. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2009 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Backlog of unexamined patent applications” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.