What do the fee support scheme insights show?
The insights present information on the uptake and financial volumes of the five fee reduction schemes available to small and micro-entities, across two panels. You can toggle between these two panels using the tabs at the bottom of the screen.
Overview panel
The upper part of the overview panel shows the financial support for the five support schemes over the years. For example, it shows that in 2024 the total support was almost EUR 11.8 million, with a breakdown for the share across the five support schemes.
In the lower part the financial volumes for three support schemes are shown in greater detail, providing the number of cases for which reduced fees were paid. For example, an application for which filing and examination fees were reduced would show as two cases in these statistics.
Unitary Patent share
The insights also provide the Unitary Patent share of all granted patents that received language-related support.
Example:
Patents granted for applications that previously received language-related support: 10 000
Number of requests for unitary effect for these 10 000 patents: 6 000
This would result in a Unitary patent uptake rate of 60%.
As language-related support is only available to small entities, the percentage is an indicator showing that the Unitary Patent uptake rate is much higher for small entities than for the average over all patents.
Micro-entity support
The second tab of the insights provides more detail on the micro-entity support scheme, which has been available since 1 April 2024.
Requests and their outcomes
The insights provide information about the number of requests for micro-entity support and the outcome of these requests. As micro-entity support is available for all main fees throughout the patent granting process, there are some cases, where the application was initially eligible for support, but which later became ineligible, for example if the application was transferred to a large enterprise.
Such cases are shown as temporarily valid in relation to fee reductions.
All applications with valid or temporarily valid requests are shown with a breakdown by filing strategy, origin of request and technical area, providing further insights into who is using this new support scheme.
Financial volumes
The total amount saved by micro-entities since the start of the support scheme is provided as “Savings for micro-entities”.
This amount is then broken down into different fee groups, corresponding to the different stages of the patent grant procedure.
Dynamic filtering
Filters can be applied to all charts by clicking on a filing strategy, a country, a technical area or a fee group. Within the pie charts, smaller pies appear therein to show the impact of a selected filter.
For example when clicking on Germany, the largest share of the filing strategy pie is “EP direct”, whereas when clicking on the United Kingdom, the largest share is for “Euro-PCT (EPO=ISA)”.
Similarly, the impact of a filter on the country distribution is shown by colours. To reset any filter simply click on the chosen filter (e.g. country, technology) a second time.