Filing a German trademark: procedure, classes and fees

Filing a German trademark electronically with the German Patent and Trademark Office costs 290 euros and covers up to three classes of goods and services. Each additional class costs 100 euros. Once examined, registration is regularly completed within a few months; accelerated examination costs an additional 200 euros.

Filed on paper, the same application costs 300 euros under the fee schedule to the Patent Cost Act. How this base fee plays out over ten years and across different numbers of classes is shown in the cost calculation further below, for three cases: a sole proprietorship with one class, a medium-sized company with five classes, and an expansion of protection into the European Union.

The DPMA trademark divisions first check the application for completeness: the applicant, the representation of the mark, and the list of goods and services. The application is only processed once the filing fee has been paid in full. A hard deadline applies: according to the office, the fee must be credited within three months of the application being received, otherwise the application counts as withdrawn by operation of law, together with the priority secured on the filing date. At the EUIPO this period is one month from receipt of the application, and examination only starts after payment. The office then examines the absolute grounds for refusal under Section 8(2) of the Trademark Act. These include a lack of distinctive character, purely descriptive indications of kind, quality, quantity, intended purpose, value or geographical origin, terms that have become customary in general language use, deceptive signs, and violations of public policy or accepted principles of morality. State emblems and official hallmarks or test marks are excluded as well.

Earlier rights of third parties are not part of this examination. On its procedure page, the DPMA states explicitly that the filing procedure does not examine whether earlier trademark or other identifier rights stand in the way of registration; if opposition or invalidity proceedings follow later, the mark can still be cancelled again.

If no grounds for refusal apply, the mark is registered, published in the electronic Trademark Gazette, and the owner receives a certificate of registration. According to the office, the filing procedure is regularly completed within a few months in cases that lead to registration; the office does not give an exact number of months for this. For the present the office qualifies this itself and points to longer processing times because the number of applications has risen sharply. The most frequent reason for a longer processing time, according to the DPMA, is errors in drawing up the list of goods and services; an electronic filing through DPMAdirektWeb using a list built from the official classification database speeds up processing.

Accelerated examination under Section 38 of the Trademark Act shortens the waiting time for an additional fee of 200 euros (fee number 331 500). Given sufficient cooperation from the applicant, a decision on such an accelerated filing must be made within six months of filing in every case.

Every trademark application assigns its claimed goods and services to the Nice Classification. It comprises 45 classes: classes 1 to 34 stand for goods, classes 35 to 45 for services. The version in force is the 13th edition, 2026 version, effective since 1 January 2026. A new edition appears every three years, and since 2013 a new version of the same edition has additionally appeared every year.

The number of claimed classes affects the fee differently at the DPMA and at the EUIPO. The German filing fee of 290 euros fully covers up to three classes, with each additional class costing 100 euros. At the EUIPO, by contrast, only one class is included in the base fee: a second class costs an additional 50 euros, and each further class from the third onward costs 150 euros. For the identical trademark application with three classes, this produces two different cost structures, as the calculation in the next section shows.

The fee schedule to the Patent Cost Act lists one item for filing and one for renewal, each covering up to three classes within the base fee. It contains no separate item for adding a class to an application already filed or to an existing registration afterward. The choice of classes made at filing therefore fixes the scope that the base fee and the renewal fee cover for the entire term of protection.

Under Section 47(1) of the Trademark Act, the term of protection for a German trademark is ten years from the filing date; renewal under Section 47(2) extends it by another ten years each time. The following three calculations add the electronic filing fee and one renewal after this first ten-year term has run.

• Case 1, sole proprietorship with one class in Germany: 290 euros electronic filing at the DPMA (fee number 331 000), which includes up to three classes and already covers the one claimed class, plus 750 euros renewal after ten years (fee number 332 100), again for up to three classes, giving 1,040 euros over ten years.
• Case 2, medium-sized company with five classes in Germany: 290 euros electronic filing at the DPMA with three classes included (fee number 331 000), plus twice 100 euros for the fourth and fifth class (fee number 331 300), giving 490 euros for filing; plus 750 euros renewal after ten years with three classes included (fee number 332 100), plus twice 260 euros for the fourth and fifth class (fee number 332 300), giving 1,270 euros for renewal; a total of 1,760 euros over ten years.
• Case 3, expansion into the European Union with three classes: 850 euros base fee for the first class plus 50 euros for the second plus 150 euros for the third class at the EUIPO, giving 1,050 euros for filing, plus 850 euros base fee, 50 euros and 150 euros for renewal after ten years, giving a further 1,050 euros, for a total of 2,100 euros over ten years.

Up to three classes therefore cost the same amount at the DPMA; a difference only appears from the fourth class onward, as case 2 shows: 100 euros per class at filing, 260 euros per class at renewal. The costs in case three come on top of a German filing: cases one and two follow the fee schedule to the Patent Cost Act at the DPMA, case three follows the EUIPO fee schedule; the two offices and fee systems exist independently of each other.

If a renewal is paid late, the DPMA charges a surcharge of 50 euros (fee number 332 101). At the EUIPO, the surcharge for a renewal paid within the grace period is 25 percent of the late fee, capped at 1,500 euros (fee code F-016).

The procedure is not finally over once a mark is registered. Registration is published in the electronic Trademark Gazette, and from the day of that publication, Section 42(1) of the Trademark Act starts a three-month period during which third parties can file opposition against the mark. Grounds for an opposition are earlier rights that the office did not examine during filing. Filing an opposition costs a base fee of 250 euros for one opposing sign and 50 euros for each further sign (fee numbers 331 600 and 331 610).

At the EUIPO, the starting point differs: the three-month opposition period there already runs from publication of the application in the EU Trade Marks Bulletin, not from registration. In the case of an EU trademark, the opposition risk therefore falls earlier in the procedure than with a German filing.

• Checking a name before filing: Trademark search before filing
• Obligations and deadlines after registration: Trademark watch