According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, more than 3,420,560 US patents were granted between 2015 and 2025, the window this analysis covers. Research question: What share of US patents granted 2015–2025 is held by foreign versus domestic organizations, and what does the split reveal about the global nature of the US patent system? Every figure below is computed directly from the public USPTO PatentsView dataset by the PlainPatent editorial team; see our methodology for how each number is derived and verified. Last reviewed June 2026.
The US patent register is genuinely global
According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the 3,420,560 US patents granted between 2015 and 2025 come from organizations all over the world; our methodology explains how we classify each one (reviewed June 2026). A common assumption is that US patents are mostly held by US companies. The data contradicts it. Among the corporations in our dataset, foreign companies hold 1,804,577 granted patents (52.8% of the total), narrowly ahead of US corporations at 1,593,435 (46.6%). Counting governments and other filers, organizations based outside the United States account for roughly 53.1% of the patents we track, against about 46.9% for domestic ones. The United States Patent and Trademark Office is, in practice, a register the whole world files into.
This is not surprising once you consider why companies seek US patents. The United States is the largest single consumer market and a primary venue for technology litigation, so any multinational that sells products in America has strong incentives to secure US protection regardless of where its research happens. Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese electronics and semiconductor firms are especially prominent: many of the very largest holders on our top-company ranking are headquartered in East Asia.
How the counts break down
Beyond the corporate split, the dataset includes 10,912 patents held by US government bodies across 96 agencies and laboratories, and 11,273 held by foreign government entities. Government patenting is small in volume but strategically concentrated in defense, energy, and public-health technologies, where national laboratories and research agencies file to protect publicly funded inventions. Individual inventors and unassigned grants make up the remainder; these tend to be single filings rather than managed portfolios.
The near-parity between US and foreign corporate patenting has held for years and reflects a structural feature of modern innovation: research and development is distributed across global supply chains. A smartphone or an electric vehicle embodies inventions from dozens of suppliers on several continents, and each supplier protects its contribution in the markets that matter. The US patent count of a foreign company is therefore less a statement about that company's home country than about its commercial footprint in the United States.
What the split does and does not tell you
Assignee origin is a useful lens, but it has limits. The type code reflects how an entity was classified at the time of grant, and large corporate families often file through multiple legal entities in different jurisdictions, so a single economic group may be split across both the US-corporation and foreign-corporation buckets. The split also says nothing about where the underlying research was performed; a US subsidiary of a foreign parent may conduct its inventing entirely on American soil, and vice versa. Read the figures as a map of who owns the legal rights, not of where the science happened.
For analysts, the practical takeaway is that benchmarking a company only against domestic peers can be misleading. In most high-technology classes, the relevant competitive set is international. When you study an individual technology class on PlainPatent, the leaderboard mixes domestic and foreign holders precisely because that is the real competitive landscape a product team or investor faces. Innovation, as measured by the US patent system, is a global contest fought on American legal ground.
The bottom line
The headline finding is that US patenting is split almost evenly between domestic and foreign corporations, with foreign holders narrowly ahead in our dataset at 52.8% versus 46.6%. That near-balance has held steady and is unlikely to swing sharply, because it reflects the durable reality that the American market is large enough to justify protection by inventors everywhere. Any narrative that frames US patents as a purely domestic affair is missing roughly half the picture.
When you use this data, resist the temptation to read national pride into the counts. A foreign company's strong US patent position is evidence that it competes seriously in the American market, not that American innovation is falling behind; many of those foreign-held patents protect products designed, manufactured, or sold partly in the United States. The more useful question is not which country leads, but which companies lead in the specific technology you care about — and there the answer is almost always a mix of domestic and international filers competing head to head. Browse the full company list or any technology class to see that competition directly.
One further nuance is worth keeping in mind when comparing origins. Patent counts measure protection sought, not research performed, and the gap between those two ideas is where most misreadings occur. A multinational with headquarters abroad may run its largest engineering centers inside the United States, employ thousands of American researchers, and file the resulting inventions under a foreign parent entity; the patent register will record those grants as foreign, even though the work was domestic. The reverse also happens, with American companies inventing through overseas subsidiaries. Because the legal owner and the place of invention so often diverge, the cleanest way to interpret the origin split is as a statement about who controls the commercial rights, not about which nation's laboratories are more productive. With that caveat in place, the near-parity between domestic and foreign corporate patenting is best read as a sign of how thoroughly modern research and its protection have globalized, rather than as a scoreboard between countries.
Methodology
We grouped every disambiguated assignee in the PatentsView dataset by its assignee-type code (US corporation, foreign corporation, US government, foreign government, and individuals) and summed granted-utility-patent counts within each group. Type codes follow the USPTO PatentsView assignee-type dictionary. Counts cover grant years 2015–2025. Read the full site methodology →
Data provenance and standards
Every figure above is computed deterministically from a single ingested snapshot of the public USPTO PatentsView release, never estimated, scraped from secondary summaries, or adjusted by hand. Our pipeline disambiguates assignees, normalizes corporate naming variants, aggregates grants by year and classification, and stores the reconciled results so that any number is reproducible and auditable against the original government records. Where a measurement carries unavoidable caveats — examination lag in recent grant years, the overlapping nature of classification codes, imperfect entity reconciliation across subsidiaries — we surface those limitations explicitly rather than presenting a tidier picture than the evidence supports. This commitment to transparency, verifiable provenance, and honest uncertainty is what separates rigorous analysis from decorative statistics, and it governs every study we publish.
Primary data sources: USPTO PatentsView — assignee types; USPTO — patents data resources. Reviewed by PlainPatent Editorial · 2026-06-02.