Why doesn't my company appear in PlainPatent?

PlainPatent shows the top 50,000 companies by patent count for 2015–2025. Companies with fewer than a handful of patents in this period may not appear. Individual inventors are also excluded from the company view.

Can I look up a specific patent number?

PlainPatent currently shows company and technology-level aggregations, not individual patents. To look up a specific patent, visit USPTO Patent Center at patents.google.com or patft.uspto.gov.

Are design patents included?

No. PlainPatent covers utility patents only. Design patents protect ornamental appearance, utility patents protect functional inventions. The vast majority of commercially significant patents are utility patents.

According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, more than 3,420,560 US patents were granted to tracked assignees between 2015 and 2025. This guide explains how to read that data on PlainPatent; every figure we publish is computed directly from the public USPTO PatentsView dataset, and our methodology documents how each is derived and verified. Last reviewed June 2026.

How to Read US Patent Data

Patent data can be dense and confusing. This guide explains the key metrics and codes used on PlainPatent in plain English.

Patent Counts

The number shown is granted patents — not applications. Applications are filed when inventors submit an idea; grants happen after the USPTO examines and approves it. Only grants confer legal protection. On average, only about 55–60% of applications become granted patents.

PlainPatent shows data for 2015–2025 grants. Earlier patents are excluded because (1) older patents are near or past their 20-year expiration, and (2) ownership records become less reliable over time due to corporate mergers and acquisitions.

CPC Technology Codes

The Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) assigns technology codes to every patent. The code structure is hierarchical:

H= Section (Electricity)

H04= Class (Electric Communication Technique)

H04L= Subclass (Transmission of Digital Information)

H04L 9= Group (Arrangements for secret communication)

PlainPatent organizes data at the subclass level (4-character codes like H04L, G06F). This is the most useful level for understanding technology domains without getting lost in excessive granularity.

Patent Claims

Claims are the legal heart of a patent — they define exactly what is protected. There are two types:

Independent claims: Stand alone and define the broadest scope of protection
Dependent claims: Build on independent claims to add specific details and narrower protection

Average claims per patent ranges from about 5 (simple utility patents) to 50+ (complex software or pharmaceutical patents). More claims generally means broader, harder-to-avoid protection.

Assignees vs. Inventors

An inventor is the person who created the invention. An assignee is the entity that owns the patent — usually the employer. PlainPatent shows assignee (company) data, not individual inventors.

Assignee names can be messy: "Apple Inc.", "Apple Computer Inc.", and "Apple" may all appear as separate entities in raw data. PatentsView applies disambiguation to link these to a single company. PlainPatent uses the disambiguated assignee data.

Data source: All data is from USPTO PatentsView, a public research dataset maintained by the US Patent and Trademark Office.