When the new patent legislation comes into force, you’ll have more options. You’ll be able to decide how comprehensively you’d like your patent application to be examined:

• Partial substantive examination 
  As before, the IPI will examine every patent application for compliance with various legal requirements but not for novelty and inventive step. 
  However, we’ll now carry out a fee-based search on the state of the art for every application and summarise the key findings in a report. The search report will be published on Swissreg together with the application. This will provide you and interested third parties with information on the patentability of the filed invention and help you decide how to proceed.

• Full substantive examinatio
  If you wish, you can now request an examination of all patentability requirements, including novelty and inventive step. You’ll thus receive a fully examined patent, as in other countries, which means that you’ll be better able to assess whether your patent would stand up in court.

The new patent legislation will also offer you the following benefits: 

• If you submit the technical documents in English, you’ll no longer need to have them translated into an official language, as it will be possible to publish applications in English (Article 58a para. 4 of the new Patents Act). 

You can find out more about what’s new in the revised patent law on our website.

Yes, most patent applications that are already pending when the new legislation comes into force and for which the examination fee has not yet been paid will automatically be subject to the new legislation from that date. The examination of these patents will therefore be completed in accordance with the new legislation (Art 150 para. 1 of the new Patents Act).

However, an exception will be made for patent applications at a very advanced stage

• whose examination fee was paid before the commencement date
• and that are not deferred at that point in time.

The examinations of these applications will be completed in accordance with current legislation. In such cases, it will not be possible to check for novelty and inventive step. However, you can request a search on the state of the art.

Yes. Even if you’ve already paid the examination fee, you can ask for your pending application to be examined under the new legislation. 

Please note: If the substantive examination of your application is already in progress under the current legislation but you wish to have your application examined under the new legislation, this may result in delays and additional costs (for the retrospective mandatory search). 

Once the examination on filing and the formal examination of a patent application have been successfully completed and the application has been published, we normally send out the invoice for the examination fee approximately two years after the filing date or priority date. If you’d like to receive the invoice earlier, you have two options:

1. Accelerated substantive examination
   Once the examination on filing and formal examination have been completed, you may request an accelerated substantive examination (Art. 63 of the current Patents Ordinance). In this case, we’ll send the invoice early and then begin the substantive examination early. The internal processing deadlines for the substantive examination will also be brought forward.
    
2. Early invoice dispatch
   This option is available to you until 30 September 2026: if you don’t wish to accelerate the substantive examination itself, you can write to us after the examination on filing and formal examination of your application to request that we send you the invoice for the examination fee at an early date. If you then pay the examination fee on time, the examination of your application will be completed under the current legislation, without the substantive examination being accelerated.

Please note: In both cases, the decisive factor is not the date of your request but rather the fact that you paid the examination fee before the new patent legislation came into force. If, for example, you don’t submit the request for accelerated processing until the end of December, you may not receive the invoice until after the new legislation has come into force. As a result, the application will be subject to the new law. The same applies if you receive the invoice before the new rules come into force but don’t pay it until after 31 December 2026. In both cases, the application will be refused (as with standard invoicing) if the examination fee isn’t paid.

That depends on whether you’ve already requested a voluntary search in connection with your application or not.

If no voluntary search has been carried out yet in accordance with Art. 59 para. 5 of the current Patents Act and no search report has been published yet, we’ll conduct the mandatory search on the state of the art once the new provisions come into force.

Yes, a search fee must be paid for retrospective searches, just as it must be paid for new patent applications. We’ll send an invoice for all pending applications once the new legislation comes into force.