Executive summary
During 2025, the EPO made significant progress on many of the key performance indicators (KPIs) across all five drivers that underpin the EPO Strategic Plan 2028 (SP2028). Several KPI targets have been met early and others have been made more challenging due to progress made.
Under Driver 1 – People, the EPO focused on fostering staff engagement, attracting the best talent from across Europe, emphasising learning and development, and supporting mobility and flexibility. Overall staff engagement rose to 75%, achieving the overall target and showing improvements in several areas. The New Ways of Working Scheme continues to be widely valued, with 60% of staff expressing a preference for remote or hybrid working.
In 2025, the EPO received over 11 700 job applications, an all-time high. Gender diversity continued to be a priority, with 35.5% of all staff and 30.5% of new examiner recruits being women. This was partly thanks to the rollout of the empowering women campaign which included a series of communication measures showcasing women patent examiners and targeting potential women candidates on LinkedIn. Of the 97 Young Professionals who joined the Office, 63% were women. The Young Professionals Programme was expanded in 2025, with 20 new STEM universities; their students will be eligible to apply from 2026 onwards.
During the year, the EPO enhanced the quality, coverage and impact of its learning offer. Initiatives included the introduction of a targeted re-skilling programme for examiners, with a pilot project in batteries and fuel cells; lectures from university and industry experts and visits to conferences and fairs; a comprehensive AI learning programme; a peer-to-peer management support programme for women team managers; and a new process to strengthen knowledge transfer activities during the offboarding of staff.
We continue to value internal mobility, allocating resources where they are most needed. We also took steps to support staff health, such as the May edition of Campus Days with a broad programme focused on sports, safety and preventative care, attended by over 4 000 colleagues. Awareness promotion on health continued, with 88% of managers now having completed the mandatory training on psychosocial wellbeing.
In social dialogue, the EPO held a number of meetings and made progress on many topics such as a more inclusive parenthood scheme and enhancing confidential counselling services for staff, by introducing external Workplace Solutions counsellors, who offer support with professional challenges. We continued to promote a culture of dialogue, resulting in a significant decrease in litigation: internal appeals fell by 27% and ILOAT complaints were down by 35% compared to 2024.
In 2025, we strengthened the effectiveness and maturity of the Integrated Management System and advanced sustainability reporting in line with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards. As part of the Building Investment Programme, all staff in Berlin were moved to the new office by the end of February 2025; the Shell building in The Hague was fully decoupled in preparation for deconstruction; and new solar panels were installed in Munich.
The EPO continued its digital transformation in line with Driver 2 – Technologies, focusing on simpler processes and modern platforms, while safeguarding security, availability and user services.
The digitalisation of the patent granting process (PGP) has been advanced with improvements to task management in the Patent Workbench, support for workload management via the Digital File Allocation, the integration of the ANSERA search tool with examination tools such as Trimaran, and support for communication drafting. AI tools have been implemented to assist examiners in areas including minute writing for Oral Proceedings, search, classification and the Digital File Repository.
Under the online user engagement delivery pipeline, initiatives included: opening the Legal Interactive Platform (LIP) to all MyEPO users; improving the MyEPO interface and increasing self-service and digital actions; launching a searchable database of professional representatives; enhancements to the shared area; the introduction of colour filings; preparation for end-to-end DocX filing; and decommissioning of the legacy online filing software (eOLF).
The EPO also modernised and simplified corporate-support systems. During 2025, we created a talent intelligence hub for mapping employees’ skills, digitalised several HR processes, such as the registration of partners as well as parenthood declarations, and enhanced the offboarding process by introducing structured checklists for staff. We also made several efficiency improvements in finance and procurement, for example in the financial closing process, and provided new online services for the Administrative Council secretariat. A number of initiatives helped modernise the IT landscape, including an upgrade to the new cloud-based SAP technology, faster WiFi 6 in Berlin and the decommissioning of several legacy technologies.
With regard to Driver 3 – High-quality, timely products and service, in addition to strengthening quality at source by enhancing digital tools that support applicants in filing and communication with the EPO, we also expanded self-service features to improve access to patent and non-patent literature (including multimedia). Transparency and interaction were improved through enhancements to the Shared Area.
In 2025, 130 user meetings were organised. We held 42 meetings with user associations where we discussed overall quality and timeliness objectives and performance and topics of interest such as the developments in the Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court (UPC). Where the user associations represented a particular geographic region, we compared the usage of EPO’s acceleration schemes and the UP and UPC from one region to another.
As part of our work to build on the accuracy and completeness of searches and written opinions and to improve examination by ensuring that the EPC is applied in a consistent way across our examining teams, we further integrated the Active Search Divisions (ASD). Overall, 93% of respondents to the User Satisfaction Survey 2024/2025 (USS) expressed satisfaction with our search products and the audit outcomes by Directorate Quality Audit (DQA) for search and written opinion reached 94% with no findings related to validity.
We have taken several steps to improve assessment of added subject-matter and by the end of the year our quality audits on grants showed fewer findings on added subject-matter (4.6% of audited grants) - achieving our KPI. We also implemented several actions to strengthen clarity in the Patent Granting Process (PGP). Following an in-depth analysis of Boards of Appeal (BoA) decisions, five new KPIs were added to the Quality Dashboard for examination and opposition and to improve the application of the problem-solution approach in the assessment of inventive step, a workshop for all opposition examiners took place in June. At grant stage, overall audit outcomes as measured by DQA improved, with the proportion of files with no findings related to validity reaching 88.8% in 2025.
Last year, three Stakeholder Quality Assessment Panels (SQAPs) sessions were held: one on search reports and written opinions, one on grants and the first-ever session dedicated to oppositions. In total, 66 attorneys and EPO experts assessed 108 cases, organised into 18 panels across different technical fields. This was welcomed by users and the outcome was fed into our Quality Action Plan. The SQAPs were also changed to allow more observers, both external and internal, almost doubling the number of observers who attended the sessions.
On timeliness, 82.6% of search, examination and opposition standard files were produced on time in 2025. Search timeliness (standard cases) further improved to 86.8% at the end of 2025, with a mean duration of 5.1 months, while 75.8% of standard cases were finalised within the 36-month target starting from the valid examination request, with a mean duration of examination of 24.2 months. Overall, our processing time from filing to grant in 2025 was 36.5 months for standard cases, with 74.8% of such cases being completed end-to-end within 48 months (78.5% within 48 months for divisional applications).
In 2025, we managed to reduce further the opposition stock down to a low level of 3 335 pending files, significantly less than the pre-pandemic number of 5 000. As a result of our efforts in this area the overall mean duration is now at 19.1 months, and 51.6% of standard cases were completed within 18 months, a clear improvement compared to 38.4% in 2024 with a commitment to achieving our target of 70% on time by the end of 2026.
Demand for our products remained high in 2025, with a total incoming workload of 443 352 patent products (searches/written opinions, examinations and oppositions) during the year.
Under Driver 4 – Partnerships in 2025 the EPO deepened collaboration with European and international partners to reinforce Europe’s innovation ecosystem, support users and enhance competitiveness, legal certainty and skills development.
The 19th Annual Meeting on Co-operation was held in Reykjavik in June and for the first time, it featured a standalone Young Inventors Prize ceremony.
Preparations for the accession of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Moldova progressed steadily, marking an important step towards extending the European Patent Convention (EPC) community to 41 contracting states. Towards the end of 2025, Georgia also formally expressed interest in acceding to the EPC. During the year, new Bilateral Co-operation Agreements were concluded with all 39 member states.
In December, the second cycle of the convergence of practices programme concluded, representing progress towards greater alignment of practices and enhanced legal certainty for users across Europe. The EPO also continued to drive substantive patent law harmonisation with a European case law study on prior user rights.
In IT cooperation, 2025 saw further consolidation of services, decommissioning of legacy systems and the launch of the Digital Toolkit. Deliveries included upgraded Front Office services such as improved security, accessibility for users with disabilities, as well as interoperability with back office systems in member states, full deployment of ANSERA‑based SEARCH to over 40 national patent offices in both member and non-member states, and AI‑enabled solutions supporting classification, translation and access to legal information.
The European Commission adopted the Adequacy Decision for the EPO, recognising its data protection framework as providing an equivalent level of protection to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This makes the EPO the first international organisation to receive such a recognition, while bringing our data exchange with member states under a more solid framework.
The validation agreement with the Lao People’s Democratic Republic entered into force and Burundi, El Salvador and São Tomé and Príncipe signalled their intention to initiate validation negotiations.
Multilateral co-operation advanced through engagement in meetings of the IP5, which focused on topics including advancing digital transformation and strengthening the application of AI in patent office operations, and the Trilateral with the JPO and USPTO, which highlighted improving patent quality and operational efficiency through advanced IT and AI-driven tools, as well as on aligning approaches to emerging technologies.
In 2025, the EPO and CNIPA agreed to extend the pilot whereby the EPO acts as an International Searching Authority (ISA) for nationals and residents of the People’s Republic of China filing PCT applications in English with CNIPA for a further five years, until 30 November 2031.
A new version of the EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines was pre-published on 1 February ahead of entry into force on 1 April including, for the first time, a set of Unitary Patent Guidelines. On 1 April 2025, amendments introducing gender-neutral language into the EPC Implementing Regulations and associated texts entered into force.
By the end of 2025, almost 79 000 Unitary Patents had been registered by the EPO. In 2025, more than one in four European patents granted resulted in a request for unitary effect. In EPC member states, uptake was even higher at 40%, reflecting strong interest from European industry with particular interest from SMEs, individual inventors, universities and public research organisations (PROs). In June 2025, the EPO launched an upgraded and expanded version of the Unitary Patent Dashboard. The Office published its contribution to the European Commission’s report on the operation of the Unitary Patent Regulation.
During the year, the European Patent Academy delivered 136 training activities, totalling 1 532 learning hours and attracting almost 30 000 registrations. Engagement with digital learning also continued to grow, with the e-learning centre reaching over 23 000 active users and recording close to 300 000 visits. Important projects include the Modular Intellectual Property Education Framework (MIPEF), the Children & Youth initiative and conferences such as Opposition Matters, Litigation Matters, the BoA Case Law Conference and the European Judges’ Forum.
The PATLIB Conference 2025 in Vienna attracted a record of almost 4 000 online viewers. The Knowledge Transfer to Africa (KT2A) initiative extended its reach, engaging 80 universities in 29 African countries through tailored training, mentoring and twinning partnerships.
The Observatory expanded its output, with 14 publications which were downloaded almost 100 000 times during the year. It also launched the Scenarios for the Future 2025–2045 initiative to be delivered in 2027.
Under Driver 5 – Financial Sustainability, the Office implemented different actions. To enhance monitoring, the EPO developed the Financial Study KPI dashboard, while the insourcing of EPOTIF asset management will improve cost efficiency. To mitigate the risk from exposure to capital market fluctuations and inflation we implemented a funding level of 105% for all benefit liability plans and applied the new risk tolerance policy to the funding of pension and social security schemes. During the December Council, the Office also presented a review of the salary adjustment method, which has completed its six-year cycle.
By delivering on all drivers under SP2028, the EPO is making progress on its goal of building a more sustainable patent office that is high-quality, accessible and future proof. The EPO is in a strong position as it looks forward to marking its 50th anniversary in 2027.
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