Founders tend to treat trademark registration as either free or impossible. The USPTO's published fee schedule puts it in between: a defined cost, a defined process, and real but specific benefits. If you are using a name or logo to advertise, you may already have common-law trademark rights - federal registration is what strengthens and broadcasts them.

The filing math

The base application fee is $350 for each class of goods or services in the application, and the USPTO cautions that additional fees can apply based on the completeness and complexity of your filing. Its own example: a clothing line of golf shirts, dress shirts and t-shirts falls in one class, so the base fee is $350. Add custom t-shirt printing services and you are in a second class - $700 in base fees, again before any surcharges. Before you file, search for similar trademarks; the office's trademark basics section lists that search as a distinct step for a reason, because a confusingly similar existing mark is the cheapest application killer there is.

Your filing basis matters too. Already selling under the name in US interstate commerce? That is a use-in-commerce application. Not launched yet but genuinely planning to? That is intent-to-use, which adds later filings and fees - you must file an allegation of use, with its own fee, before the application can be approved.

What registration buys

The USPTO lists the benefits plainly. Your mark enters the federal database, so anyone searching sees public notice of it. You get a legal presumption of ownership - in federal court the registration certificate itself proves it. You can bring suit in federal court, use the registration as a basis for foreign filings, put the ® symbol on the mark, and record it with US Customs and Border Protection, which can stop infringing imports.

None of that happens automatically on filing - the application is examined, then published for opposition, before registration. Until registration you may use TM or SM, but not ®.

Keeping it alive

A registration can last forever, but only if you keep using the mark and file maintenance documents on schedule. The first maintenance filing is due after five years. At each ten-year mark you owe a declaration of use plus a renewal application - $325 each, so $650 per class, every decade. Miss the intervals and the registration dies, and you start over. For a startup, the practical rule: calendar the five-year date the day the certificate arrives, and budget the ten-year renewal like any other recurring vendor cost.

The sequence, end to end

The USPTO lays the process out as discrete stages: search for similar trademarks, file the application with your goods and services listed by class, wait through examination, then approval for publication, then registration. After that, the maintenance rhythm described above keeps it alive. The office also maintains online tools for each stage, and its basics series covers the recurring failure modes - its "common problems in applications" entry is worth reading before paying the fee.

For a startup the practical order is: search before you fall in love with a name, file once the name survives the search, choose the filing basis that matches reality, and diarize every maintenance date. The ® symbol is earned at the end of that road, not the beginning.