EPO fees from 1 April 2026: the new schedule

What did the Administrative Council actually decide?

By decision CA/D 9/25, taken on 11 December 2025 and published as OJ EPO 2026, A2, the Administrative Council adopted revised European patent fees applying with effect from 1 April 2026, and deleted the last sentence of Rule 93, paragraph 2 of the Implementing Regulations to the EPC.

That is the whole of the instrument in one sentence: a date, a fee schedule, and one small textual amendment to the Implementing Regulations. For an in-house team, the practical content is the schedule, and the practical question is not whether the decision is controversial — it is not — but whether every number your docketing system holds still matches the number the EPO will expect from 1 April 2026 onwards.

One framing point before the figures. What follows are the amounts that apply from 1 April 2026. Whether any given line is higher, lower or unchanged against the rate currently sitting in your system is a comparison you need to run against your own records, line by line. Anyone budgeting a 2026-2027 portfolio should treat the new schedule as the authoritative column and their existing fee table as the column to be corrected.

What does it cost to get an application on file and searched?

The filing fee is EUR 135 where the European patent application is filed online and EUR 285 where it is not filed online, with a further EUR 17 for the 36th and each subsequent page of an application comprising more than 35 pages.

The gap between the online and non-online filing fee is worth flagging to anyone in your organisation who still occasionally files on paper — a client-facing colleague, a foreign associate working to a local habit, an inventor filing directly. On these numbers, the choice of filing channel alone is a EUR 150 difference on a single application, and it is entirely within your control.

The page surcharge is the line that quietly scales. At EUR 17 per page from the 36th, a specification that runs to 100 pages carries EUR 1,105 in page fees before anything else has happened. Sequence listings, long tables of experimental data and generous drawing sets are the usual culprits. This is not an argument for cutting disclosure that you need — but it is an argument for deciding consciously, at drafting stage, what is carried into the European filing rather than importing a priority document wholesale.

On the search side, the fee for a European or supplementary European search is EUR 1,595, and the fee for an international search is EUR 1,885.

Where do the larger fees fall across a prosecution timeline?

The designation fee for one or more contracting states is EUR 720; the renewal fee for the 3rd year of a European patent application is EUR 725; the examination fee for a European patent application for which a supplementary European search report is drawn up is EUR 2,010; and the fee for grant including publication of the European patent specification is EUR 1,135.

Read in sequence, this is where the cost profile of a typical case actually sits. The filing and search stage is comparatively light; the examination fee is the single largest scheduled payment on the way to grant on the figure given here; and the grant fee arrives at the point where a business has usually already decided the case is worth keeping.

Renewal fees then take over. The 3rd-year renewal fee for a pending application is EUR 725, and the renewal fee for the 10th and each subsequent year is EUR 1,865. For a portfolio with a long tail of older cases, that per-year figure multiplied across the estate is likely to move your annual maintenance budget more than any single prosecution fee on the list. Note that the schedule as summarised here gives the 3rd year and the 10th-and-subsequent-year figures; the intervening years are separate lines that need to be read off the published schedule directly rather than interpolated.

What do extra claims cost now?

The claims fee is EUR 290 for the 16th and each subsequent claim up to the limit of 50, and EUR 720 for the 51st and each subsequent claim.

This is the line most likely to change drafting behaviour, because the second tier is more than double the first. A set of 60 claims attracts 35 claims at EUR 290 and 10 at EUR 720 — EUR 17,350 in claims fees alone. The same subject matter distributed across a family, or trimmed on entry into the European phase with the surplus held back for a divisional, produces a very different number.

The combination of the claims fee tiers and the EUR 17 page fee means that the size of what you file is now a budgeting decision, not just a drafting preference. If your organisation files US-origin cases into Europe with the claim set unamended, this is the schedule to put in front of the people who make that call.

What about divisionals, oppositions and appeals?

The fee for a divisional application of fifth or any subsequent generation is EUR 955; the opposition fee is EUR 880; and the appeal fee is EUR 2,015 for an appeal filed by a person referred to in Rule 7a, paragraph 2(a) to (d), and EUR 2,925 for an appeal filed by any other person.

The divisional figure quoted here is the fee for the fifth and any subsequent generation — relevant to the small number of deeply cascaded families where each further generation carries its own charge.

The two-tier appeal fee matters for anyone planning contentious spend. The schedule distinguishes appeals filed by persons falling within Rule 7a, paragraph 2(a) to (d) from appeals filed by any other person, and the difference is EUR 910. Whether a particular appellant falls within that category is a question to be answered against Rule 7a itself; the fee schedule simply attaches two different amounts to the two cases. For opposition planning, EUR 880 remains a modest official cost relative to the professional fees any serious opposition generates — the fee is rarely the reason an opposition is or is not filed, but it belongs in the estimate.

What does this decision not settle?

The decision fixes amounts; it does not, in what is set out above, resolve how reductions and refunds operate, how payments straddling 1 April 2026 are to be treated, or what practical consequences follow from the deletion of the last sentence of Rule 93, paragraph 2 EPC.

Those are real gaps for planning purposes. In particular, if your team makes a payment in the days immediately before or after 1 April 2026, the question of which rate applies is governed by rules that need to be checked in the published decision and the EPO’s own guidance, not assumed. Do not build a docketing rule on an assumption about which date governs; verify it first.

Equally important: this decision concerns European patent fees payable to the EPO. It says nothing about national renewal fees payable to contracting states after grant, and nothing about Unitary Patent renewal fees. A portfolio budget built only on this schedule will therefore be incomplete at exactly the point where post-grant costs begin to dominate.

Finally, the deletion of the last sentence of Rule 93(2) EPC is a change to the Implementing Regulations that sits alongside the fee schedule in the same decision. Its scope should be read from the amended rule text itself before anyone assumes it is purely consequential.

What should you do before 1 April 2026?

Update the fee tables and cost estimates in your docketing and matter-management systems to the amounts effective 1 April 2026, and put a checkpoint in place for payments made around that date.

Concretely: refresh every stored fee value against the published schedule rather than adjusting last year’s figures by an assumed percentage; re-issue any client or budget-holder estimate that quotes official fees for filings expected in 2026 and 2027; and run a short reconciliation in April 2026 over every payment made in the surrounding fortnight, confirming that each was made at the correct amount. An underpayment discovered late is a deficiency; discovered early, it is an administrative correction.

Then take the claims fee and page fee figures back to whoever approves European filings. EUR 290 per claim from the 16th, EUR 720 per claim from the 51st and EUR 17 per page from the 36th are numbers that reward a deliberate decision about what goes into the application, made before filing rather than after the fee invoice arrives.