New fees for a European patent application will come into force from April 1, 2009. These new fees are valid for every application, which is filed from April 1, 2009 or which enters from a PCT application (international application according to the Patent Co-operation treaty) into a European national phase.

One basic change affects the claim fees. The fee for every claim exceeding 50 claims, i. e. claims 51 et seqq, is increased from currently € 200 to € 500. Due to this increase, separate applications are getting economically more interesting as applications with a plurality of claims.

Another change affects the designation fees which, so far, had to be paid separately for each state in which the European patent should be valid, wherein the fees were capped through a maximum amount of 7 designation fees. These fees which had to be paid separately are now detached by a so-called flat fee, which does not depend on the number of contracting states of the European Patent Convention. The flat fee will amount to € 500. Everybody, who has filed a European patent application with more than 7 designation states, will obtain a slight reduction of fees, while everybody, who has filed European patent applications with less than 7 states, will have to pay significantly more.

Furthermore, additional fees will be introduced for applications which exceed a defined number of description pages. An additional fee of € 12 is due for each page of the application exceeding 35 pages from April 1, 2009.

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