USPTO Patent Term Adjustment Climbs to 318 Days — Nearly Three Times Its 2021 Low as Examination Delays Worsen

The six-week trailing average for Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) on newly issued U.S. utility patents reached 318 days in mid-April 2026, according to data published by Patently-O on April 21. That figure marks a return to the levels that prevailed at the USPTO in 2015, when the Office was still working through the backlog it had accumulated in the early 2010s. Compared to the historic low of 120 days recorded in mid-2021, average PTA has now increased by roughly 165 percent in fewer than five years — and analysts see no sign the trend is leveling off.

What Patent Term Adjustment Is and Why It Matters

PTA is a statutory entitlement under 35 U.S.C. § 154(b) that adds days to a patent’s twenty-year term to compensate for delays caused by the USPTO during prosecution. Days accumulate when the Office takes longer than specified statutory periods to act — for instance, when it fails to issue a first Office action within fourteen months or allows total prosecution to extend beyond three years. Delays attributable to the applicant reduce the adjustment. The average PTA figure serves as a widely watched proxy for the Office’s examination throughput and is closely monitored by patent practitioners, in-house IP teams, and litigation strategists alike.

A Decade of Progress, Then a Sharp Reversal

From 2015 forward, the USPTO made consistent progress in reducing its average PTA, largely by expanding the examiner corps and streamlining procedures in response to recommendations from the Government Accountability Office. By mid-2021, the Office had brought the six-week trailing average down to approximately 120 days — a result that led many practitioners to conclude that the chronic delay problem had been substantially resolved.

The years since 2021 tell a different story. A surge in applications after the pandemic, stagnation in examiner hiring, and — most recently — broader federal workforce reductions under the current administration have combined to push examination times steadily higher. As University of Missouri law professor Dennis Crouch, who tracks PTA data on Patently-O, noted in his April 21 analysis, the slope of the current trend shows no sign of flattening.

Two Metrics, Two Stories: Backlog Count vs. Examination Speed

At the same time, the USPTO has publicized a different metric that tells a more optimistic story: as of April 6, 2026, the number of unexamined applications stood at 776,995 — the lowest level in two years and down roughly 61,000 from the January 2025 peak of 837,928. Director John Squires has cited this figure as evidence that the Office’s productivity initiatives are working.

The coexistence of the two metrics, however, reveals a structural tension. A falling unexamined-application count suggests the Office is closing cases at a reasonable pace. A rising PTA suggests that the applications being prosecuted through to issuance are taking longer to traverse the examination process — which may reflect examiners working through each case less thoroughly under heavier caseloads, or applicants and examiners cycling through more rounds of Office actions before reaching allowance. With the average wait for a first Office action already exceeding twenty months, the pipeline pressure shows little prospect of easing through 2026.

Industry Implications: Pharma, Biotech, and Challengers

The practical stakes differ markedly across industries. For pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, a longer PTA directly extends the window of market exclusivity for blockbuster drugs and biologic therapies, potentially adding hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over the life of a product. In that sense, high PTA represents an inadvertent subsidy to innovators with long-cycle products.

Generic manufacturers, biosimilar developers, and companies that rely on inter partes review (IPR) challenges to clear patent thickets face the opposite effect: exclusivity periods that run longer than modeled financial assumptions, delaying market entry and compressing competitive windows. For generic drug makers, a single additional year of patent term on a major product can translate into billions of dollars of foregone revenue.

What Practitioners Should Do Now

Three areas of practice deserve heightened attention in the current environment. First, PTA calculation audits: the USPTO’s internal PTA computations are derived from prosecution dockets and are not always accurate. Filing a PTA challenge under the procedures set out in MPEP 2736 can recover days — and in some cases months — of erroneously deducted term. As examination timelines lengthen, the complexity of PTA calculations increases and the probability of USPTO computation errors rises with it.

Second, accelerated examination options are more economically justified than ever. The Track One prioritized examination program, which costs approximately $4,500 for most applicants, offers a path to first Office action within about six months, compared to the current twenty-month standard wait. Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) agreements — including the U.S.-Japan channel — provide similar expediting benefits for applicants who have obtained favorable rulings in partner offices. In fast-moving technology sectors such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and medical devices, the value of earlier patent rights typically outweighs the cost premium.

Third, applicant-side delay management warrants renewed focus. Every day of applicant delay reduces the PTA the patent will ultimately receive, and as prosecution cycles lengthen, the risk of inadvertent deadline slippage grows. Monitoring response deadlines rigorously — and avoiding unnecessary extensions of time — preserves maximum PTA credit.

The ASAP! Program and the Limits of AI-Assisted Search

Director Squires has positioned the Artificial Intelligence Search Automated Pilot program (ASAP!) — which pairs applicants and examiners in joint AI-assisted prior-art searches — as a tool for reducing examination delays. The program’s petition deadline was extended to June 1, 2026 in April, and a petition fee previously set at $450 was waived for filings after March 23, 2026, to incentivize greater participation.

The broader impact on aggregate examination delay remains limited, however. ASAP! participants represent a small fraction of total USPTO filings, and the program’s design makes it suitable primarily for applicants willing to engage actively in a collaborative prior-art search at an early stage of prosecution. It is not a systemic solution to the staffing and workload dynamics driving PTA upward.

Absent a significant change in USPTO hiring policy or a surge in examiner productivity, the trend line in PTA data suggests that the 318-day figure recorded in mid-April 2026 may not represent a ceiling. Quarterly PTA readings through the rest of the year will be closely watched as a leading indicator of the Office’s operational health.