The USPTO has changed how fees for Information Disclosure Statements (IDS) work, this change was implemented 2025-01-19.
A brief overview of the changes are as follows:
There are now fees for when the cumulative number of references that the applicant supplies exceed the following thresholds: 50, 100, 200. These fees are not insignificant and do not scale by entity size.
Between 51 and 100 references = $200
Between 101 and 200 references = $500
Over 200 references = $800
However, do note you reduce the larger fee by the smaller, so if you had cited over 50 citations and then cited over 100, but you already paid the $200 fee earlier, you would pay $300 for the second fee instead of $500. This applies to the over $200 fee as well.
These fees apply to applications filed before these changes.
These new fees do not replace the standard IDS filing fee, this is now called the “IDS timing fee” and these new fees are “IDS size fees”.
These numbers do not include references that were filed by the examiner or a “third party”.
Duplicate items are counted.