The Board closed fiscal year 2026 with its smallest appeal inventory in fifteen years and a 38 percent reversal rate in the software technology center

2026-10-19Costs

Listen · Thinking Makes It So, 2026-10-19 · 7 min

All episodes · Subscribe: Apple Podcasts · Spotify

United States Patent and Trademark Office, Patent Trial and Appeal Board, Appeal Statistics as of September 30, 2026, ex parte appeal receipts and dispositions, fiscal year 2026 (October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026); percentages computed by Burbage Law, PC from the Office's table

The Board decided 4,829 ex parte appeals in fiscal year 2026 against 3,684 filed, and its inventory of pending appeals fell from 3,125 at the start of the year to 1,977 at the end, a drop of 1,148, or 36.7 percent; the Office's chart of year-end inventories since fiscal year 2012, which starts at 26,570, has no lower value. Across the Board, 2,886 appeals were affirmed, or 59.8 percent, 387 affirmed in part, or 8.0 percent, and 1,521 reversed, or 31.5 percent. Technology Center 2100, which examines computer architecture, software and artificial intelligence subject matter, decided 526 appeals and reversed 202, a reversal rate of 38.4 percent, and affirmed in part 36 more, so 45.2 percent of its appellants had at least one rejection reversed. Technology Center 2400 reversed 36.0 percent and Technology Center 2600 reversed 35.9 percent, while Technology Center 3600, which holds the business method art units, decided 996 and reversed 224, or 22.5 percent, with 71.6 percent affirmed outright. Single months swing: in September 2026 alone Technology Center 2100 reversed 6 of 29. The source is the Office's fiscal-year-to-date table; each row was checked so that affirmed, affirmed in part, reversed, remanded and dismissed sum to the appeals decided, every row passed, and the percentages are those counts divided by that row's decided total. The same document reports that appeals decided in July through September 2026 took longer from receipt to decision than those decided a year earlier in nearly every technology center, which is consistent with a Board working through its oldest appeals. The Office does not report outcomes by type of rejection, so there is still no official reversal rate for eligibility rejections.

What it changesThe queue an appeal enters today is a third shorter than the one it entered a year ago, and the Board is deciding 131 appeals for every 100 filed; the pendency figures in the same document run the other way, which is what deciding old appeals does to the measure, so the right reading is that an appeal filed this quarter joins a shorter line, not that the Board has become fast. For an artificial intelligence application in Technology Center 2100 carrying a rejection the examiner would not drop after an interview, the numbers favor the appeal over a second request for continued examination: a 45 percent chance that at least one rejection is reversed, against a continued examination fee that buys another round with the same examiner. In Technology Center 3600 the same rejection is a 28 percent chance, which is why the classification an application receives at filing is worth arguing about, and why a claim drafted to the computing improvement rather than to the transaction it serves is a budget decision as much as an eligibility one. Anyone quoting a reversal rate for eligibility rejections in particular is quoting a private analysis of Office data, and that caveat belongs next to the number when it is used to justify an appeal budget.

More on Fees, term and prosecution statistics · Eligibility of software and AI claims

← All recent developments · Search all developments

Burbage Law is the practice of Jon Burbage, a registered patent attorney. 342 United States patents have issued from applications he wrote; the full list is on the Patents page. More about Jon Burbage.

This is general information about a published decision, agency guidance or piece of legislation. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Items concerning offices outside the United States are reported for information only and are not counsel on the law of those countries.