2026 Is Filing Trademarks Faster Than Any Year Since the 2021 Boom
Through April, 2026 has produced 225,274 trademark filings — the most in any January-to-April stretch since the pandemic-era surge of 2021.
Founder, GleanMark
Through April, 2026 has produced 225,274 trademark filings — the most in any January-to-April stretch since the pandemic-era surge of 2021. April itself logged 60,975 applications, the second-strongest April in our same-month history and the second consecutive month above 60,000. The register is not cooling. It is running at an altitude it has not touched in five years.
We think this likely reflects two overlapping forces. AI-startup formation is pushing software and technology-service marks onto the register at a clip that shows up most clearly in Class 42, up 55.2% year over year. And e-commerce and brand-registry filing pressure continues to hold the baseline high. March's 61,352 filings looked like a spike when they landed. April turned that spike into a trend line.
"Two months above 60,000 isn't a blip — it's the new floor. The register is being fed by two engines at once: AI company formation and industrialized e-commerce filing. Neither is slowing down."
What We Found
- 2026 is the busiest year-to-date since 2021. 225,274 filings through April, 9.6% ahead of 2025 and the highest four-month total in this comparison since 2021's 243,424.
- April was the second-strongest April on record here: 60,975 filings, behind only April 2021's 69,269, and the second straight month above 60,000.
- Class 42 broke out: Class 42 recorded 7,198 class claims, up 55.2% year over year — the largest annual move of any class in the top 15.
- Amazon filed NLX and VOICE+ the same day it announced buying NLX. Both marks landed April 23, the date AWS announced acquiring conversational-AI firm NLX. This is a register footprint of a deal, not a roadmap leak.
- Samsung extended its Flex Magic Pixel display family with a new companion mark, FLEX CHROMA PIXEL, filed alongside the now-shipping FLEX MAGIC PIXEL.
Filing Volume
| Month | Total Filings | MoM Change |
|---|---|---|
| April 2025 | 52,785 | — |
| May 2025 | 48,440 | -8.2% |
| June 2025 | 50,447 | 4.1% |
| July 2025 | 54,850 | 8.7% |
| August 2025 | 53,722 | -2.1% |
| September 2025 | 56,026 | 4.3% |
| October 2025 | 52,991 | -5.4% |
| November 2025 | 49,015 | -7.5% |
| December 2025 | 53,761 | 9.7% |
| January 2026 | 53,063 | -1.3% |
| February 2026 | 49,884 | -6% |
| March 2026 | 61,352 | 23% |
| April 2026 | 60,975 | -0.6% |
The headline number to ignore is the month-over-month one. April slipped 0.6% from March. That is noise. The number that matters is that filings stayed above 60,000 for a second straight month — a level the register hit only once between March 2026 and the 2021 boom.
Year to date, 2026 has produced 225,274 filings, 9.6% ahead of 2025's 205,553 and the highest four-month total since 2021. On a same-month basis, April 2026 ran 15.5% above April 2025. A weak month does not do that. For the April cohort, 60,893 filings remain pending — which is exactly what a recent cohort should look like.
Every April, 2016–2026
| Year | April Filings |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 35,517 |
| 2017 | 36,166 |
| 2018 | 41,639 |
| 2019 | 45,085 |
| 2020 | 41,179 |
| 2021 | 69,269 |
| 2022 | 49,636 |
| 2023 | 46,445 |
| 2024 | 51,609 |
| 2025 | 52,785 |
| 2026 | 60,975 |
April 2026 trails only April 2021 in the same-month history shown here.
Year-to-date filings through April
| Year | Filings Through April |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 243,424 |
| 2022 | 195,242 |
| 2023 | 178,321 |
| 2024 | 192,404 |
| 2025 | 205,553 |
| 2026 | 225,274 |
2026 is the only post-2021 year to clear 220,000 through April. The 2021 peak still stands well above everything since, but the gap is the narrowest it has been in five years.
NICE Class Leaderboard
| Rank | NICE Class | Description | Filings | MoM | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 41 | Education, entertainment, sporting, and cultural services | 7,866 | -7.9% | 20.1% |
| 2 | 9 | Electrical and scientific apparatus; downloadable software | 7,727 | 0.4% | 18.1% |
| 3 | 42 | Scientific and technology services; software design | 7,198 | -6.3% | 55.2% |
| 4 | 35 | Advertising, business, and retail services | 6,582 | -5.9% | 12.2% |
| 5 | 25 | Clothing, footwear, and headgear | 6,510 | 0.5% | 22.1% |
| 6 | 3 | Cosmetics and cleaning preparations | 3,139 | -3.6% | 15.9% |
| 7 | 5 | Pharmaceuticals and medical supplies | 3,001 | -3.8% | 3.8% |
| 8 | 28 | Toys, games, and sporting goods | 2,915 | 6.8% | 12.4% |
| 9 | 21 | Housewares and glass | 2,755 | 14.5% | 6.6% |
| 10 | 16 | Paper goods and printed matter | 2,473 | -2.2% | 12.7% |
| 11 | 36 | Insurance, financial, and real estate services | 2,318 | -7% | 10.3% |
| 12 | 44 | Medical, beauty, and agricultural services | 2,005 | -6.7% | 6.9% |
| 13 | 20 | Furniture and plastic goods | 1,964 | 11.7% | 13.5% |
| 14 | 30 | Staple foods | 1,688 | -7.7% | 1.9% |
| 15 | 11 | Environmental control apparatus | 1,557 | 6.7% | 0.5% |
Class 41 topped the leaderboard, narrowly ahead of Class 9. The familiar quintet — entertainment, software-adjacent goods, technology services, business services, apparel — holds the top five. The story is in the year-over-year column.
Class 42 is the standout: up 55.2% from last April, more than double the next-fastest class. It slipped 6.3% month over month, but a one-month dip in a 7,000-plus class against a 55% annual gain is not a reversal. A 55% annual move in a top-three class is too big to wave off as seasonality. We think AI tooling, software services, and data-infrastructure formation are doing most of the work here, and the Amazon filings below are a clean illustration of why. (Note the unit: NICE rows count class claims, not applications, so these figures are not one-to-one with the filing-volume section.)
Class 25 is the other heater, up 22.1% year over year — apparel and footwear are not ceding ground to software. Among bulkier consumer-goods classes, Class 21 posted the strongest month, and Class 28 also rose. Technology is the breakout. Marketplace commerce is the ballast.
Top Filing Owners
| Owner | Filings | Prior Month | MoM |
|---|---|---|---|
| SWITCH, LTD. | 60 | 0 | — |
| UNIFIED CORE PUBLISHING LLC | 42 | 1 | 4,100% |
| WALMART APOLLO, LLC | 37 | 11 | 236.4% |
| L'OREAL USA S/D, INC. | 36 | 19 | 89.5% |
| ADVANCED DEFENSE SYSTEMS, INC. | 35 | 0 | — |
| E.L.F. COSMETICS, INC. | 33 | 12 | 175% |
| Lidong Jiao | 33 | 0 | — |
| Suanxi Jiang | 32 | 1 | 3,100% |
| Glaxo Group Limited | 29 | 0 | — |
| Ghost Global LLC | 28 | 3 | 833.3% |
| Joyin US Corporation | 28 | 0 | — |
| GAMES GLOBAL USA INC. | 27 | 15 | 80% |
Read this table for filer type, not for innovation. Walmart Apollo, L'Oréal, E.L.F., Glaxo, and Games Global are recognizable portfolios running scheduled brand programs. The individual names and several of the zero-to-thirty jumps look like batch filings — marketplace sellers, portfolio cleanup, or defensive clusters dropped in a single month. A high count tells you a queue cleared, not that a company got more creative. The useful read is that large brand portfolios and online-commerce filers are competing for the same examiner bandwidth.
Top Correspondent Firms
| Firm | Filings | Prior Month | MoM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Swyft Legal LLC | 974 | 949 | 2.6% |
| LZ Legal Services, LLC | 799 | 1,001 | -20.2% |
| Overseas Operation Services, Inc. DBA Flatfee Corp. | 652 | 603 | 8.1% |
| SOLORIO LEGAL PC | 426 | 233 | 82.8% |
| Alioth Law P.C. | 385 | 246 | 56.5% |
| YK law (New Jersey) | 373 | 231 | 61.5% |
| Grogan, Tuccillo & Vanderleedeen, LLP | 339 | 343 | -1.2% |
| MEDIA LAW GROUP | 285 | 256 | 11.3% |
| Sparring Legal LLP | 263 | 271 | -3% |
| BAYRAMOGLU LAW OFFICES LLC | 255 | 192 | 32.8% |
| One Juris PC | 251 | 249 | 0.8% |
High-throughput filing shops dominate the top of this table. Swyft Legal led with 974 filings; LZ Legal held second despite shedding a fifth of its volume from March. The more interesting movement is below them: Solorio Legal, Alioth Law, YK law, and Bayramoglu Law all posted sharp month-over-month gains, several from a few hundred filings. This is the operational side of the volume story. The register is busy not only because famous companies are naming products, but because filing intake itself has been industrialized.
Notable Filings
"The trademark register is the cleanest public preview of a company's product roadmap — companies just don't realize how early they're talking."
| Owner | Mark | Serial | Filing Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS, CO., LTD. | FLEX MAGIC PIXEL | 79450444 | April 29, 2026 | Pending |
| SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS, CO., LTD. | FLEX CHROMA PIXEL | 99792391 | April 28, 2026 | Pending |
| AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC. | VOICE+ | 99781763 | April 23, 2026 | Pending |
| AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC. | NLX | 99781762 | April 23, 2026 | Pending |
| NIKE, INC. | PHANTOM | 99776480 | April 21, 2026 | Pending |
| GOOGLE LLC | UCP | 99776598 | April 21, 2026 | Pending |
| DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC. | DISNEY · PIXAR · THE INCREDIBLES | 99774699 | April 20, 2026 | Pending |
| GOOGLE LLC | VIRGO NETWORK | 99774294 | April 20, 2026 | Pending |
| GOOGLE LLC | ALPHAMATTER | 99770415 | April 17, 2026 | Pending |
Amazon: NLX and VOICE+, filed the day of the acquisition
This is the cleanest story on the page, and it is not a roadmap leak — it is a paper trail. Amazon Technologies filed NLX (99781762) and VOICE+ (99781763) on April 23, 2026 — the same day AWS announced it had acquired the conversational-AI firm NLX and was folding it into Amazon Connect. VOICE+ is not a generic voice-assistant tease; it is NLX's own trademarked product, "Voice+," its patented multimodal voice technology. Filing both on announcement day is exactly what you would expect: Amazon papering over the brand assets that came with the deal. For reporters, the takeaway is the timing match, not a mystery name.
Samsung: FLEX CHROMA PIXEL joins the Flex Magic Pixel family
Do not mistake these for unknown product clues. FLEX MAGIC PIXEL is Samsung Display's privacy-screen technology — first shown at MWC 2024 and shipping in 2026 as the "Privacy Display" feature on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, where AI narrows the display's viewing angle for sensitive apps. The April 29 filing (79450444) is housekeeping on a known, in-market mark.
The genuinely new entry is FLEX CHROMA PIXEL (99792391), filed April 28, which has no obvious public counterpart at filing time. The "Chroma" naming and the shared "Flex … Pixel" structure suggest a color-oriented sibling to the privacy technology rather than a fresh brand. We'd watch this one; we would not yet guess what it ships in.
Nike: PHANTOM
Nike filed PHANTOM (99776480) on April 21. Phantom is an established Nike football-boot line — the Phantom 6 launched in June 2025 — so this reads as portfolio maintenance and coverage refresh around a known silo, not a new product reveal. For footwear brands, a single such mark routinely spans footwear, apparel, equipment, digital content, and retail presentation, which is why these filings keep recurring.
Google: ALPHAMATTER, VIRGO NETWORK, and UCP
Google filed three marks in five days: ALPHAMATTER (99770415) on April 17, VIRGO NETWORK (99774294) on April 20, and UCP (99776598) on April 21. We searched each and found no clear public product they map to as of filing — which is the norm for Google's intent-to-use filings, not evidence of anything. ALPHAMATTER fits Google's "Alpha-" naming habit; UCP is the kind of three-letter mark worth flagging for follow-up precisely because it gives nothing away. These are watch items, not conclusions.
Disney: DISNEY · PIXAR · THE INCREDIBLES
Disney Enterprises, Inc. filed DISNEY · PIXAR · THE INCREDIBLES (99774699) on April 20. This points squarely at the established franchise, so the question is not what the name means but what lane Disney is protecting — licensing, content, games, toys, apparel, or live experiences. The filing date is the hook; the goods-and-services description, once it surfaces, is where the reporting starts.
TTAB Activity
| Type | Filings | Prior Month | MoM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oppositions | 752 | 697 | 7.9% |
| Cancellations | 254 | 253 | 0.4% |
Oppositions climbed to 752 while cancellations held flat at 254 — disputes are tracking the same upward pressure as prosecution. The month's most-active plaintiff is Toren Gida, a Turkish food company with eight proceedings, which most U.S. practitioners will not recognize; a single foreign brand owner topping the list usually signals a concentrated enforcement push against a cluster of similar applications rather than a broad campaign. The names below it tell the familiar story: Dior, Chanel, Adidas, and Jean Patou are luxury, fashion, and fragrance houses policing lookalikes, Trek is doing the same in bikes and equipment, and Alo's six filings show how aggressively wellness-lifestyle brands now defend their expansion lanes.
Registration Rates
| Cohort Month | Total Filed | Registered | Registration Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2025 | 52,785 | 21,030 | 39.8% |
| March 2025 | 52,969 | 23,067 | 43.5% |
| February 2025 | 38,348 | 14,651 | 38.2% |
| January 2025 | 61,451 | 31,448 | 51.2% |
| December 2024 | 53,459 | 26,210 | 49% |
| November 2024 | 47,795 | 22,895 | 47.9% |
| October 2024 | 52,967 | 26,167 | 49.4% |
| September 2024 | 51,308 | 23,184 | 45.2% |
| August 2024 | 50,411 | 16,219 | 32.2% |
| July 2024 | 50,715 | 18,534 | 36.5% |
| June 2024 | 46,732 | 18,825 | 40.3% |
| May 2024 | 51,570 | 25,544 | 49.5% |
Mature cohorts are landing in a high-30s to low-50s registration band, with January 2025 highest at 51.2% and August 2024 lowest at 32.2%. April 2026 is too young to judge on registrations; the April story is volume, class mix, and early brand behavior, not outcomes.
Practitioner Takeaways
- Treat April as elevated, not soft. A 0.6% dip from March is meaningless when the month is the second-strongest April on record and 2026 is the busiest year-to-date since 2021.
- Software and AI marks are where the growth is. Class 42 up 55.2% year over year is the clearest category signal in the data, and the Amazon/NLX filings show the deal-driven mechanics behind it.
- Don't read owner volume as innovation. Brand programs, marketplace sellers, and batch filers all produce big counts for unrelated reasons. Check the filer type first.
- Disputes are rising with prosecution. 752 oppositions and 254 cancellations mean both ends of the system are demanding attention at once.
Methodology: figures cover USPTO trademark applications by filing date, drawn from GleanMark's mirror of the full USPTO dataset (~14M records). NICE-class rows count class claims, not applications, so they are not one-to-one with filing volume. Recent-month filings are ~99% pending — that reflects prosecution timing, not outcomes — and registration rates use cohorts old enough to have matured. Firm totals cover filings mapped to a correspondent (~70% of the month). Informational, not legal advice.
Explore more USPTO data analysis on the GleanMark Insights blog.
More in this series
Previous: March 2026 · Next: May 2026 · Browse all filing reports
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