U.S. Trademark Statistics 2026: What 98,000 USPTO Records Show

Most trademark advice is written from the filer's chair: how to apply, what it costs, how long it takes. This report looks at the records themselves. Every figure below comes from the TMarkMetric database of 98,243 U.S. federal trademark records, loaded from two USPTO bulk data files. Before reading any of the numbers, it helps to know what kind of sample this is.

A Correction, and Why It Matters

An earlier version of this report said about 90% of these records were "live and registered" and that roughly one in ten trademarks dies. Both statements were wrong. Our import had treated USPTO status codes 400–699 as "registered", but in the USPTO's status code table most of that range means an application is still being examined (630 is "New Application", 641 a non-final Office Action), and 600–609 means it was abandoned. Code 700, "Registered", had been filed under dead. We went back to the original USPTO files, grouped every record's code using the official table and recomputed every figure on this page on 13 October 2026.

The honest conclusion is narrower than the old one. A sample made mostly of applications filed a few months ago can't tell you how many trademarks survive, because most of them haven't reached a decision yet. A survival rate needs applications old enough to have been either registered or abandoned, and it needs all of them, not a slice. And registration isn't the end of the story either: a registered mark can still die later if the owner misses a Section 8 maintenance filing.

What You Can Still Learn From It

Counts of who files, where owners are recorded and which classes they pick don't depend on how an application ends. Those are the parts of the data worth looking at, as long as you remember they describe this snapshot rather than the whole register.

One more limit: the 2026 filings aren't spread evenly. March alone accounts for 38,889 of them and May for just 153. That reflects the bulk files we loaded, not a real collapse in filings, so don't read month-to-month changes in this set as a trend.

Which States Owners Are Recorded In

Ranking records by the owner's state of record produces a result that looks wrong until you understand it:

Delaware comes first, ahead of California, Florida, Texas and New York, despite being the second-smallest state by land and having around 1/40th of California's population. Delawareans aren't unusually entrepreneurial. A huge share of U.S. companies incorporate in Delaware for its corporate law, and these counts use the state where the owning entity is organized — the USPTO record lists its mailing address separately. Wyoming in the top ten tells the same story from the LLC side: it is a popular low-cost state to form an LLC. About a third of all records (31,586) list an owner outside the 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico, or no state at all.

The Most Active Trademark Classes

Every application is filed in one or more of the 45 Nice classes. Counting the first-listed class on each record, these nine lead:

Class 9, which covers software, apps, downloadable content and electronics, is the most-claimed primary class in the set. It is followed by Class 25 (clothing), Class 35 (advertising, business and retail services, the class most e-commerce brands need) and Class 41 (entertainment and education). If you are filing in one of these crowded classes, expect a harder likelihood-of-confusion search and plan for it.

Who Appears in the Data: Mostly One-Time Filers

The 98,243 records belong to 72,134 distinct owners, and 59,858 of them appear exactly once. Among the 2026 filings, the USPTO data records 21,774 as filed by individuals and 12,825 by LLCs. A large share of new applications, in other words, come from small businesses and sole founders filing a single brand.

What the data does not show is how big corporate portfolios really are. Nike appears here with 37 records, but that is only the slice that happens to be in these two files; the company's full USPTO history is far larger. Our owner ranking explains how to read those counts.

Word Marks Dominate

Of the records with a known drawing type, about 95% are word marks (75,698 "Standard Character" plus 16,615 recorded under the older "Typed Drawing" label), against 4,739 design or logo marks. That matches the usual advice: a word mark protects the name itself in any font or styling, so most owners file it first and add a logo later, if at all.

Methodology

Figures come from the TMarkMetric database: 98,243 U.S. federal trademark records loaded in June 2026 from two USPTO bulk XML files. Status is taken from each record's USPTO status code and grouped with the USPTO's published code table: 700–705, 778, 790 and 800 count as registered; 600–609, 614, 618, 626 and 710–714 as dead; 900 as expired; the other listed codes as pending. Codes that aren't in the table, or whose outcome the code alone doesn't show (such as 780, a cancellation proceeding that ended), are reported as unclear. 1,201 records were added later through the Markbase search API, which returns USPTO status codes; 778 of them were re-checked against Markbase on 13 October 2026 and grouped the same way, and the other 423 keep the status they were stored with. State counts use the state in the owner's nationality field — where a company is organized or of which a person is a citizen — not the owner's address (corrected 19 October 2026; the counts did not change); class counts use the first-listed Nice class. This is a snapshot, not the complete USPTO register, and statuses have moved on since June 2026. Check any individual mark on the USPTO's TSDR system. Recomputed on 2026-10-13.