On 3 December 2022 the response period for most trademark office actions changed from six months to three. The change came out of the Trademark Modernization Act, it applies to applications filed under Sections 1 and 44, and it halved the single most common deadline in trademark prosecution.
Dockets built before that date, and systems that hard-coded six months, have been computing the wrong date ever since.
Which period applies
- Three months for applications filed under Section 1 (use or intent to use) and Section 44 (foreign registration or application). One three-month extension is available for a fee, giving six months in total.
- Six months for Section 66(a) Madrid applications, which were excluded from the change — and no extension request is available to them.
Post-registration office actions follow the same three-month pattern with an available extension.
The date runs from issuance
Not from receipt, not from the day someone opened the file. The issue date printed on the action starts the clock. With electronic delivery these are usually the same day, but where they differ, the issue date governs.
This matters more than it sounds. The USPTO emails a notification to the correspondent of record; it does not post the action. If that email address is stale — an attorney who has left, a firm the client no longer uses — the action still issues and the three months still run.
What happens when it runs out
The application goes abandoned. The USPTO then issues a notice of abandonment, and that notice starts a second, shorter clock: two months to file a petition to revive on an unintentional-delay standard.
That second window is the most urgent thing that can appear on a trademark docket. It is two months, it cannot be extended, and the application is lost outright if it closes. A docket that tracks office actions but not revival windows is tracking the less dangerous of the two.
How to respond
What a response has to address, how 2(d) and descriptiveness refusals differ, and what changes once a refusal is final: the office action response guide.
Final refusals
A final refusal carries the same response period but different options. The routes are an appeal to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, a request for reconsideration, or both — and a request for reconsideration does not by itself extend the time to appeal. Running them in the wrong order, or assuming one buys time for the other, is a common and expensive mistake.
How Sealvo computes it
From the status code and status date on the register, with the filing basis deciding whether the period is three months or six. The prosecution history is read as well, so an action that has already been responded to does not keep appearing as outstanding — which is the difference between a docket and a list of things that once happened.