US patent grants by year, 2015–2025

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: How has the annual volume of US patent grants to tracked assignees changed between 2015 and 2025, and what explains the peaks, plateaus, and the apparent recent decline? 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.

A decade of grants, charted

According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the 3,420,560 US patents granted between 2015 and 2025 did not arrive at a steady rate; our methodology explains how the yearly counts are built (reviewed June 2026). The volume of US patents granted each year to the assignees we track climbed through the second half of the 2010s, reaching a high of 351,890 grants in 2019. From a 2015 baseline of 286,191, that is a rise of 13% by 2024. The growth was not perfectly smooth — grant volume reflects how many applications the patent office finished examining in a given year, so it wobbles with examiner staffing and backlog as much as with underlying invention.

Why the most recent year looks low (and probably isn't)

The single most important thing to understand about this chart is the lag. A patent is granted two to three years after it is filed, and the most recent grant year in any dataset is always incomplete because applications filed recently have not yet finished examination. The 2025 figure of 242,894 is therefore an undercount, not a collapse in innovation — it captures only the patents that had been granted by the time the data was assembled. Reading the final data point as a real decline is one of the most common mistakes in patent analysis, and it is worth stating plainly: do not draw trend conclusions from the last one to two years of grant counts.

The same lag affects how you should read any company's recent filing velocity. When a portfolio appears to slow in the latest year, the more likely explanation is examination lag rather than a strategic retreat. Our company pages compare five-year windows rather than single years specifically to smooth out this effect, and the Innovation Score weights velocity over multi-year spans for the same reason.

What actually moves grant volume

Three forces shape the year-to-year line. The first is real R&D output: more invention eventually means more applications and, after the lag, more grants. The second is patent-office throughput. The USPTO's capacity to examine applications varies with hiring, funding, and policy, and a year of strong examiner productivity can clear backlog and lift grant counts independently of any change in invention. The third is legal and economic context — major court decisions on patent eligibility, shifts in filing fees, and macroeconomic cycles all nudge how aggressively companies file and how quickly applications convert to grants.

Because these forces overlap, a single year's number tells you little. The signal is in the multi-year shape: a sustained climb through the late 2010s, a broad plateau around the peak, and an apparent dip at the very end that is mostly an artifact of incomplete recent data. For a cleaner read on direction, look at three-to-five-year moving comparisons and at the trajectories of individual technology classes, where emerging fields show genuine acceleration that the aggregate can obscure.

Using the trend responsibly

If you take one rule from this analysis, make it this: weight the middle of the series, not its endpoints. The earliest year is a clean baseline and the peak is real, but the final year understates reality and should be treated as provisional until later data fills it in. With that adjustment, the decade reads as a story of steady growth in US patenting followed by a plateau — a maturing system operating near its examination capacity rather than one in decline. Explore the same trajectory inside any company or technology class to see how the aggregate breaks down into very different local stories.

The broader context behind the numbers

It helps to place this decade in the longer arc of American patenting. The United States has granted utility patents for well over two centuries, and the annual count has trended upward for most of that history, punctuated by plateaus that coincide with periods when the patent office worked through backlogs or when courts narrowed what could be patented. The 2015 to 2025 window sits at the high end of that long climb, which is part of why year-to-year movements look modest in percentage terms: the system is operating at a scale where adding hundreds of thousands of grants annually is routine, and a swing of a few percent reflects administrative throughput as much as any shift in the pace of invention.

That perspective should make you cautious about dramatic interpretations. A single strong year does not prove an innovation boom, and a single weak year — especially the most recent one, distorted by examination lag — does not prove a slowdown. The honest reading of the past decade is continuity: a large, mature patent system processing a steady and very high volume of applications, with the genuine signal about emerging technologies hidden inside individual classes rather than visible in the national total. Anyone who wants to understand where invention is actually accelerating should leave the aggregate behind and follow the trajectories of specific technology areas and specific companies, where the real movement happens.

Methodology

We summed granted-utility-patent counts per grant year across all assignees in the PatentsView dataset from the company_yearly table. Figures are by grant year, not filing or application year, which is essential to interpreting the most recent years correctly. 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 — grant years; USPTO — patent statistics. Reviewed by PlainPatent Editorial · 2026-06-02.