The partial revision of the Patents Act, which Parliament approved in March 2024, is expected to come into force in 2026. In May 2026, the Federal Council is due to decide on the exact commencement date of the revised law and the new Patents Ordinance.

As it takes on average two to three years from the filing of a patent application to the examination of its content (substantive examination), applications filed today may be affected by the new law. We’re pleased to inform you about the upcoming changes.

• Under the new law, the IPI will carry out a fee-based search on the state of the art for each application and summarise the findings in a statement. The search report will be published together with the application. It will provide information about the protectability of the invention. This will increase transparency and legal certainty for applicants and third parties.
• As is the case today, we generally won’t examine a patent application for novelty and inventive step. If you wish, however, you’ll be able to apply for an examination of all patentability requirements in future and thus receive a fully examined patent – as in other countries.
• In future, 15 patent claims will be examined without additional fees, instead of the current 10.
• If you submit the technical documents in English, you’ll no longer have to translate them into an official Swiss language. Voluntary translations into German, French or Italian will still be possible.

• If you haven’t yet paid the examination fee for your application by the commencement date, it will be subject to the new law.
  
  This means that a fee-based search on the state of the art will now have to be carried out. Alternatively, you can already voluntarily request a search for your Swiss patent application today. In this case, the search will be performed after the new law comes into force.

• By contrast, all applications for which the examination fee has been paid before the commencement date of the new law and which are not suspended at the time of commencement remain subject to the current law. They’re so far advanced that they’ll be finalised under the current law.

• If you haven’t yet paid the examination fee and you’d like to ensure that your application is examined from start to finish under the current law, you should apply in good time for an accelerated substantive examination.

You can find more information about the revision of the Patents Act on our website.

Do you have any questions? We’ll be happy to help you. Please write to us at infonot shown@ipito make life hard for spam bots.ch.