by Dennis Crouch
Over the past several weeks, I published a trilogy of posts examining USPTO allowance rates from three different temporal vantage points: filing cohort dates, applicant disposal dates, and examiner action dates.
- The 20-Year Allowance Rate Arc: From Trough to Peak and Back Again, Patently-O (Feb. 27, 2026);
- The Real-Time View: USPTO Allowance Rate “Dips” to 75%, Patently-O (Mar. 1, 2026); and
- The Third Way: Examiner Action Dates and the Allowance Rate Curve, Patently-O (Mar. 2, 2026).
Each approach answers a slightly different question about when and how examination policy produces outcomes. This post adds a complementary dataset: instead of looking at final outcomes (allowance or abandonment), it looks at the office actions themselves.
Three charts below are all built from a dataset of published utility patent applications and plotted as three-month moving averages that smooths the data a bit.
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