Trademark renewal letters: official or scam?

A letter or invoice that asks you to pay a private company to renew your trademark is not a USPTO notice, even when it quotes your registration number. Your status is public, so you can check it yourself in a few minutes. Do that before you pay.

This page covers renewal and registration-service letters in particular. For the general signs of a solicitation, such as lookalike email addresses, read our guide to trademark scams.

Why renewal letters work on owners

Owners know a renewal exists, but few know when it falls due. The USPTO record lists the owner's name, address and registration number for anyone to read, and senders copy those details into a letter that looks personal. A confident date and a real-looking number are often enough to make someone pay.

Kinds of letters and invoices to watch for

• A renewal notice from a company that is not the USPTO, with a fee and a deadline.
• An invoice for a listing in a trademark register or directory that you did not ask to join.
• An offer to record or publish your registration, or to send an official-looking certificate, for a fee.
• A monitoring or watch service offered with a first-year price and an automatic renewal.

How to check your status yourself

1. Find your registration or serial number in your own records, not in the letter.
2. Look it up in the status system through the USPTO's trademark search page, or start at the USPTO trademarks page.
3. Read the status, the registration date and any maintenance dates shown.
4. Compare them with the letter. If the letter names a filing the record does not show as due, treat it as a solicitation.

What the USPTO does and does not do

The USPTO does send notices about your filings, by email from an address ending in @uspto.gov, and every official document also appears in your record on the USPTO's TSDR system. It does not ask for payment by wire transfer, gift card, cash, check or money order sent to a third party. A private "registration service" is not needed to keep your mark.

The real renewal dates

Actual maintenance filings fall at set points after registration, which we list on our trademark renewal page. If you are not near one of those windows, a letter claiming a renewal is due is out of line with the record.

If you already paid

1. Call your bank or card provider and describe what happened. Ask whether the payment can be reversed.
2. Keep the letter, the envelope or email, the invoice and the payment confirmation.
3. Change your email password if you shared login details.
4. Check your USPTO record to confirm nothing on it was changed or missed.
5. Report the sender through the contact options at uspto.gov.

Paying a private solicitation does not by itself file anything with the USPTO. It does mean you may have missed a real deadline while you waited for the wrong paperwork, so the status check matters.

Keep your own address current

Letters tend to follow public data, so a correct and monitored email address on the record helps you spot a genuine notice. If you hired a firm, check that its contact details are the ones on file. Ours are on your engagement letter. If you are unsure whether a message is real, send it to us before you act on it.

To check a different name, use the free trademark search. For the filings that follow registration, see register a trademark and our guides.

This is general information, not legal advice.