Guide · Decide

Renewing vs. refiling a trademark: which one do you actually need?

People use "renew" and "refile" as if they're interchangeable. They aren't even close. One keeps the registration you already own — with its original date, its priority, its place in line. The other throws that away and starts from zero. Which one is available to you comes down to a single fact about your mark, and you can check it in about a minute.

Published 2026-07-31 · fees verified vs USPTO

They're not two routes to the same place

Renewing — more precisely, maintaining — means filing paperwork against a registration that already exists to keep it on the register. Your registration number stays the same. Your registration date stays the same. Your priority against everyone who came after you stays the same. Nobody re-examines whether your mark should have been registered in the first place.

Refiling means submitting a brand-new trademark application. New serial number. New examination. New date. As far as the USPTO is concerned, you are a first-time applicant who happens to have used this mark before. Everything you built in the old registration — the years on the register, the incontestability clock, the priority date — does not transfer.

So the goal is almost always to maintain. Refiling is the fallback when maintaining is no longer legally possible.

The one question that decides it: is your registration still live?

US trademark maintenance runs on a fixed schedule. The first Section 8 Declaration of Use is due between the fifth and sixth anniversary of your registration date. At the tenth anniversary you file a combined Section 8 & 9, and then again every ten years, indefinitely. Miss a due date and you get a six-month grace period with a surcharge — a real second chance, but the last one.

That gives you three possible situations, and each has exactly one correct answer:

You're inside your filing window (or haven't reached it yet) — maintain. File the §8 or the combined §8 & 9 and you're done for another five or ten years.
You're past the due date but still inside the six-month grace period — maintain, today, with the surcharge. This is still the cheap path, and it expires.
The grace period has closed and the registration was cancelled or expired — refiling is your only option. There is no late filing, no appeal, no reinstatement for a registration that lapsed because the maintenance documents weren't filed.

This is the part people don't believe until it's too late. A registration cancelled for missed maintenance cannot be revived — not with a good excuse, not with a lawyer, not by paying more. We wrote a whole guide on why: can you revive a cancelled trademark? The short answer is no.

If you don't know which of the three you're in, don't guess from memory. Pull your registration date and run the math — or let our free deadline checker do it from the official USPTO record in about ten seconds.

What maintaining costs, and why it's the bargain

A Section 8 filed on time through the USPTO's own system costs the government fee — currently $325 per class (verify the current amount on the USPTO fee schedule, which changes). Filing inside the grace period adds a per-class surcharge on top. You can do this yourself; see our step-by-step §8 walkthrough and the official USPTO maintenance page.

What you're buying for that money is continuity — and continuity is worth far more than the fee. Your registration keeps its original date, which is the date that beats everyone who adopted a similar mark after you. If you've been continuously using the mark for five years you may also be eligible for a Section 15 declaration of incontestability, which is commonly filed alongside the §8. That's a benefit that only exists on a registration with an unbroken history.

For a fuller breakdown of every maintenance fee and how the per-class math works, see what it costs to renew a trademark.

What refiling actually costs you (the fee is the small part)

A new application means the current per-class application fee — currently $350 per class for a base electronic application; verify it on the USPTO fee schedule before you file, since fee structures were restructured recently and surcharges apply to some filing choices. But the filing fee is not the expensive part. The expensive parts are:

Your priority date resets. The rights that flow from your registration now date from the new application, not from the original one. Anyone who filed in the years in between may now sit ahead of you.
You get examined again. An examining attorney reviews the new application from scratch, and can refuse it over marks that were registered after yours was. The registration you held for years is not a shield.
Months of exposure. Registration typically takes many months from filing. In the gap you have no federal registration — which matters for enforcement, for customs recordation, and for platform programs.
Brand-protection programs can lapse. Amazon Brand Registry and similar programs are tied to a live registration; losing it can mean losing your protections until a new one issues. See trademark renewal for Amazon sellers.
The incontestability clock restarts. Five years of continuous use under the new registration before §15 is on the table again.

Common-law rights from your actual use in the marketplace don't vanish when a registration lapses — you didn't lose your brand. But common-law rights are geographically limited and much harder to enforce than a federal registration, which is exactly why you registered in the first place.

Four in-between cases people get wrong

1. You changed your logo or wordmark

You cannot "update" a registered mark at renewal. If the change is a material alteration — a redesigned logo, a different word, a new dominant element — the registration covers the old mark, and the new one needs its own application. Minor, non-material tweaks may be fine. When in doubt, keep maintaining the old registration and file for the new mark; letting the old one die to "replace" it is how owners accidentally hand a competitor a clean shot at their priority date.

2. You've expanded into new products or services

New classes require a new application. That is a supplement, not a substitute: keep maintaining the existing registration for the classes it already covers. You end up with two registrations on different schedules — which is fine, as long as you're tracking both.

3. You stopped using the mark on some of the listed goods

Don't refile, and don't swear to use that isn't happening. Delete the unused goods or services when you file the §8. The USPTO runs a random audit program on maintenance filings, and an inaccurate declaration can put the whole registration at risk. Deleting is the safe, cheap, honest move.

4. Your application was abandoned before it ever registered

This is a different animal entirely. An application that went abandoned — usually for missing an office action response — may be revivable by petition, generally within two months of the notice of abandonment, if the delay was unintentional. That path exists for pending applications. It does not exist for a registration cancelled for missed maintenance. If you're staring at an office action clock right now, read office action deadlines.

Madrid Protocol marks are on a different track. If your US registration came through an international §66(a) extension of protection, you maintain it with a Section 71 declaration at the USPTO on the same 5–6 year and 10-year rhythm, and you renew the underlying international registration with WIPO. Two obligations, two systems. Missing either one can cost you the US rights.

How to decide in the next five minutes

Work it in this order:

Find your registration date — on the certificate, or on the USPTO's TSDR record. Registration date, not application date; they can be years apart and only one of them starts the maintenance clock.
Confirm the status says the registration is live, not cancelled or expired.
Compute the windows: §8 between the 5th and 6th anniversary, combined §8 & 9 at the 10th and every 10 years after, plus six months of grace on each.
If any window is open — file now. Maintaining is always better than refiling, and the grace period is not a plan.
If the registration is already dead — refile, and start the new one with real deadline tracking from day one.

Or skip the arithmetic: run your serial or registration number through the free checker and it reads the official record and tells you which window you're in and when it closes.

One last thing worth internalizing. Almost nobody refiles because they decided to — they refile because a date passed while they weren't looking. The USPTO sends courtesy reminders to a single email address on file, and if that address is a former attorney, a defunct agency, or an inbox nobody reads, no reminder arrives and the deadline still runs. The cost of missing it is everything described above. The cost of watching for it is close to nothing.

Frequently asked questions

Can I just refile instead of renewing if it's easier?

You can, but it's almost always a bad trade. Refiling means a new examination, a reset priority date, months without a live registration, and a restarted incontestability clock — all to avoid a maintenance filing you could do yourself. If your registration is still live and in its window, maintain it.

My registration was cancelled for a missed Section 8. Is refiling really my only option?

Yes. Once the six-month grace period closes, a registration cancelled for failure to file maintenance documents cannot be reinstated or revived. A new application is the only route back to a federal registration, and it starts from scratch.

Do I lose my trademark rights entirely if the registration lapses?

No. Common-law rights from your actual use in the marketplace survive. But they're limited to the geographic area where you've used the mark and are much harder and costlier to enforce than a federal registration — which is why refiling promptly matters.

I redesigned my logo. Do I renew the old registration or file a new one?

Usually both. A material change to the mark isn't covered by the old registration, so the new design needs its own application. Keep maintaining the original registration too, rather than letting it lapse — it holds your earlier priority date.

Find out which path you're on before the choice is made for you. Enter your serial or registration number — no account, no email — and see your exact maintenance windows: run the free checker →. For a mark your business runs on, a $49/year daily watch keeps an eye on status changes and office actions that a calendar reminder will never see.

General information, not legal advice. RenewMark is an independent service and is not affiliated with the USPTO. Fees and rules change — confirm your specifics against the official record at tsdr.uspto.gov and uspto.gov before relying on anything here.