How to File a Letter of Protest with the USPTO

To file a letter of protest with the USPTO, submit your evidence through the Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS), pay the $150 fee, and identify a specific legal ground the examining attorney can act on during normal examination. Anyone can file. You don’t need to be a party to the application or show harm. What you do need is objective evidence, correct timing, and a submission stripped of anything that reads like argument.¹

File Early, Before Publication

The USPTO accepts protests any time after an application is filed and up to 30 days after the mark is published for opposition in the Official Gazette.² Earlier is easier. A protest filed before publication only needs evidence relevant to a valid ground for refusal. A protest filed on or after the publication date has to clear a higher bar: the evidence must establish a prima facie case that registering the mark would violate federal trademark law.¹ In practice, post-publication protests are granted only when publishing the mark was a clear error. After the 30-day opposition window closes, a protest is almost certainly too late.³

Pick a Ground the Examiner Can Act On

A letter of protest has to point to a reason an examining attorney could refuse the mark on their own, without a lawsuit or an adversarial proceeding. The grounds the USPTO commonly accepts include:

Likelihood of confusion with an existing registration or prior pending application.
Descriptiveness or genericness, where the mark describes an ingredient, quality, or characteristic of the goods or services, or names the product category itself.
False connection with a person, institution, or national symbol that hasn’t authorized the use.
A widely used message the public would not perceive as identifying a single source.
Specimen problems, such as a specimen that appears digitally fabricated, altered, or used by unrelated third parties without the mark.
A registered trademark appearing in the description of goods or services in the protested application.

Each of these is something an examiner can evaluate from objective evidence, without hearing from both sides.¹

Some arguments won’t work in this forum. Prior use claims belong before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board or a court. Ownership disputes raise factual questions that can’t be resolved through one-sided examination. And if an examining attorney has already reviewed the application and reached a conclusion you disagree with, a letter of protest is not the mechanism to challenge it.¹

Assemble Evidence That Speaks for Itself

The USPTO does not forward your arguments or explanations to the examining attorney. Only the evidence and your factual index reach the examiner’s file. Every document has to make its own case.¹

You may submit up to 10 items of evidence per ground for refusal, with a hard cap of 75 total pages across the entire submission. Going over that limit without a detailed explanation of special circumstances gets the protest rejected outright.² Each piece of evidence needs an itemized index on a separate page, with a concise factual description of which ground the item supports.

What counts as strong evidence depends on the ground:

For likelihood of confusion: copies of existing registrations pulled from the USPTO’s electronic records showing current status and ownership, plus evidence that the goods or services are related. Only the first five cited registrations are considered. When the goods or services aren’t identical, include third-party evidence showing they’re related, such as advertisements from a company that sells both types of products.
For descriptiveness or genericness: dictionary definitions, screenshots of competitors using the same term to describe their own products, or third-party registrations where the term appears in the identification of goods.
For specimen problems: evidence that the same product image appears in other applications bearing different marks, or that the specimen was digitally altered or wasn’t in use by the filing date.

Every piece of website evidence must show the full URL and the date the page was accessed or printed, directly on the evidence page itself and not only in the index.¹

Keep Advocacy Out

The evidence must be purely objective. No legal arguments, no persuasive language, and nothing that identifies you or your representatives. The examining attorney is not supposed to know who filed the protest. This is where most filers slip: the instinct is to explain why the evidence matters, but the USPTO strips out anything that reads like advocacy before the file reaches the examiner.³

Submit Through TEAS

The entire submission runs through the Trademark Electronic Application System. You’ll need the eight-digit serial number of the application you’re protesting, which you can look up in the USPTO’s trademark search system.¹ Before starting the form, confirm the application is still pending and hasn’t already been abandoned or registered.

The form walks you through entering the serial number, choosing your legal ground for refusal, and uploading your compiled evidence as a single file. File a separate letter of protest for each application you want to challenge, even if the same applicant owns several.² The fee is $150 per protest, payable by credit card or electronic funds transfer, and it is non-refundable whether the protest is accepted or denied.⁴ After payment, the system generates a confirmation receipt with a tracking number.³

What Happens Next

The Office of the Deputy Commissioner for Trademark Examination Policy reviews every protest for procedural and substantive fit. If the evidence is relevant and properly formatted, the USPTO forwards only the evidence and your factual index to the examining attorney assigned to the application. The protest document itself and any arguments are stripped out.¹

The examiner then evaluates the evidence independently. Acceptance of the protest does not guarantee a refusal. The examiner may find the evidence isn’t strong enough, or the applicant may overcome any refusal by amending the application or submitting arguments. You receive a notification about whether the protest was forwarded or denied, but no detailed explanation. The decision on the protest is final and cannot be appealed.

Once you file, you’re done. You can’t respond to the applicant’s arguments, submit additional evidence, or take part in the exchange between examiner and applicant. The process stays entirely between the USPTO and the applicant from that point on.¹

Don’t Rely on the Protest to Save Your Opposition Deadline

Filing a letter of protest does not preserve your right to oppose. It doesn’t pause or extend the 30-day opposition window that opens when a mark is published in the Official Gazette.² If the opposition deadline is approaching and the USPTO hasn’t acted on your protest, file a timely extension of time to oppose or a notice of opposition to keep that route open. Letting the opposition deadline lapse because you’re waiting on the protest can cost you your only chance to block registration through adversarial proceedings.¹

1
USPTO. Letter of Protest Practice Tip
2
eCFR. 37 CFR 2.149
3
United States Patent and Trademark Office. Letter of Protest
4
USPTO. USPTO Fee Schedule