Trademark filings are growing faster than patent filings, and they have been for years. In fiscal year 2024 the United States Patent and Trademark Office received 767,138 new trademark applications, a 4.1 percent increase over the prior year. Patent filings rose too, but more slowly. The USPTO projected about 602,300 utility, plant, and reissue patent applications for the same year, a gain of roughly 1.7 percent. More brands are being protected, and the gap between the two systems keeps widening.
The Two Systems Protect Different Things
A patent protects an invention, a new and useful device, method, or design. A trademark protects a brand identifier, a name, logo, or slogan that tells buyers who made a product. They are not substitutes. A single product can carry both, a patent on how it works and a trademark on what it is called. Comparing their filing volumes measures two different kinds of economic activity, one rooted in technical novelty and the other in branding.
The numbers come from the USPTO’s own reporting, summarized in its annual performance reports. Trademark applications at 767,138 outnumbered patent applications at roughly 602,300 in fiscal 2024, and the trademark side is also expanding at more than twice the rate.
Why Trademarks Are Growing Faster
The surge has a clear driver: the cost and speed of starting a brand have collapsed. Anyone can launch a product line through an online marketplace in an afternoon, and each new brand is a candidate for trademark protection. The barrier to filing a trademark is lower than the barrier to producing a patentable invention, which requires genuine technical novelty. So the trademark count tracks the rise of small sellers and direct-to-consumer brands more than it tracks invention.
Patent filing grows on a different clock. It depends on research spending, engineering talent, and the slow work of developing something new enough to satisfy an examiner. That work does not scale as quickly as opening a storefront, which is why patent volume rises in low single digits while trademarks climb faster.
What Grew on the Grant Side
Output followed input. The USPTO granted 365,614 patents in fiscal year 2024, including 321,020 utility patents, 43,383 design patents, and 755 plant patents. Grants rose about 5.7 percent on a rolling basis. The design patent figure is worth noting for product inventors, since design patents protect how a product looks rather than how it functions, and they are often the right tool for a consumer product whose value is in its form.
What This Means for Product Inventors
For someone bringing a physical product to market, the filing data carries a practical lesson. Most inventors think first about a utility patent and overlook the other two forms of protection that often matter just as much. A distinctive product name is a trademark question. A distinctive product shape is a design patent question. A new mechanism is a utility patent question. A complete protection plan usually touches more than one system.
Sorting out which protections fit a given product is part of the early work Enhance Innovations handles for inventors. The firm, founded in 2010 and based in Champlin, Minnesota, keeps industrial design, engineering, marketing, and licensing representation in one office, so the question of how a product looks, what it is called, and how it works gets addressed together rather than across disconnected vendors. Its virtual-first process produces renderings and a CAD model that double as the visual record a design patent or a brand launch can draw on.
Inventors weighing where to start can read the USPTO’s plain-language guides on the trademark process and on utility and design patents, and the Small Business Administration covers how intellectual property fits into a broader business plan.
The Bottom Line
Trademarks are filed more often and are growing faster because branding scales faster than invention. For a product inventor, the takeaway is not to pick one system over the other but to recognize that a single product often needs protection on several fronts. The first paid step, a patent search, is also the step that clarifies which of those fronts are open and which are already crowded.
This article is informational and is not legal or financial advice. Inventors should do their own research before filing.