The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reduced its backlog of applications awaiting an initial decision, but applicants waited longer for a final decision and continued examiner departures could slow further progress, the Government Accountability Office found.
The backlog fell from about 838,000 applications in January 2025 to about 756,000 in August 2026. Over that period, the average wait for a final patentability decision increased by 11 percent, GAO said in a report publicly released November 5.
The backlog goal
In September 2025, the agency announced a goal of reducing the backlog below 599,000 applications, without specifying a deadline. It has required patent examiners to review more applications, decreased examiner training and expanded use of AI patent-search tools, according to GAO.
GAO's analysis found that, even with examiners doing more work, the agency was unlikely to reach that target before 2031 without lowering examiner attrition. The rate rose from 2.9 percent in fiscal year 2020 to 7.6 percent in fiscal year 2025. As of August 2026, the 12-month attrition rate was also 7.6 percent. The office is seeking to hire more examiners, GAO said.
Risks and response
Interviewees including the examiners' union and former officials told GAO that backlog-reduction efforts may be unsustainable and could contribute to departures. Those stakeholders said requiring more reviews and eliminating time for subject-matter training pose risks to examination quality. Stakeholders also told GAO that the expanded AI tools did not yet reliably return useful patent-search results.
Those accounts describe risks and stakeholder views; they do not establish that every examination or search was defective. GAO recommended that the office assess and address risks to retention and quality. The agency did not provide comments on the recommendation, GAO said.
What GAO reviewed
GAO analyzed patent application and examiner data for fiscal years 2020 through 2025, as well as federal workforce data on examiner attrition. It interviewed a range of stakeholders and sought information from the patent office, which did not provide the requested information. The linked full report was not reviewed for this article.