Will Your Home Address Be Public If You File a Trademark?
The USPTO requires your street address, but it hides it if you also give a different mailing address. Your email is another matter, and mistakes are very hard to undo.
Filing a trademark application creates a public record, and your name goes in it. Your home address usually does not have to. Whether it shows up comes down mostly to two boxes on the form, and a mistake in either one is very hard to undo.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requires every applicant to give a domicile address: the permanent legal place of residence of a person, or the principal place of business of a company. For most founders filing on their own, that is home. In May 2020 a trademark law firm, Chestek PLLC, applied for CHESTEK LEGAL (serial 88938938) and gave only a P.O. box as its domicile address. The examiner refused the application, the firm appealed, and it argued among other things that the rule failed to consider privacy, including its impact on victims of domestic violence and homeless individuals. On February 13, 2024, the Federal Circuit, the federal appeals court that hears appeals from the USPTO, upheld the refusal. It did not rule that privacy doesn't matter: it said those concerns had not been raised with the USPTO when it wrote the rule. On October 2, 2026, the USPTO recorded the application as abandoned after the appeal.
So a street address is generally required. What you can usually control is who sees it.
What the USPTO requires, and what it shows
The required information is the owner's name, the owner's domicile address and email address, and correspondence addresses and email addresses. A telephone number is not required.
The application form has a field for your domicile address and a separate field for your mailing address. Only address information entered in the "domicile address" field is hidden from public view. That leads to three rules:
- Give a different mailing address, if one is accurate for you, such as an office. The mailing address is public; the domicile address is not.
- Do not repeat your home address in the mailing field. Entering the same address in both fields makes that address publicly viewable.
- Do not type it anywhere else on the form. Putting the domicile address in any other part of a form makes it publicly viewable.
The masking has limits. USPTO employees can still see the hidden domicile address, and if an examiner questions it, evidence attached to the office action may show the address; you would then have to petition to have it redacted. It also has to be a real address: an address that does not identify an actual street address, or that functions as a mail forwarding address, generally may not serve as a domicile address.
If a company owns the mark, only the company's domicile address goes on the form, not the addresses of individual partners, officers, or members. A company with no fixed physical address can instead give the domicile address of a person with legal authority to bind it, and in an extraordinary situation an applicant can petition the USPTO's Director to waive the requirement. A company's domicile is its headquarters, where its senior executives or officers ordinarily direct and control the business. If you run the company from home, its domicile is your home address, and the same two-field rule applies.
Your email address: treat it as public
In an ordinary application, you must give an email address for the owner and keep it current, even if an attorney files for you. If you file on your own, your email is shown publicly as the correspondence address.
If an attorney represents you, the USPTO hides the owner's email, but it says it does this "only as a courtesy," to make it harder for the data to be scraped for solicitation, not because the data is private. Your email can become public at any time if your attorney leaves the case, and the owner's email may not be identical to the attorney's.
The USPTO's own advice is to create an email address used only for USPTO correspondence. Do it before you file. Public filing details are also how official-looking solicitations find new applicants; see how to spot fake USPTO notices.
What never belongs on the form
Leave the phone number blank if you don't want it public. Payment details are never public: card and bank numbers entered in the USPTO's electronic systems are kept confidential and separate from the application record.
Never put identity numbers in a filing: driver's license, passport or Social Security numbers, bank account details, medical information, birth certificates or tax ID numbers. If one of these ends up in your public record anyway, the USPTO asks you to make an informal request to TMFeedback@uspto.gov to remove it from public view.
Fixing a mistake is hard
Anything else you filed stays. Trademark Rule 2.25 says "documents filed in the Office by the applicant or registrant become part of the official record and will not be returned or removed." To get your home address or other personal information hidden after the fact, you must petition the Director of the USPTO to waive that rule. The Director grants a waiver only when there is evidence of an extraordinary circumstance and no harm to other parties. A petition to the Director filed online costs $400, the fee is not refunded whether the petition is granted or denied, and the petition itself becomes part of the public record. The USPTO also cannot remove an entire application or registration record.
Abandoning the application does not help. Each record remains publicly viewable even after an application is abandoned or a registration is canceled or expires.
The record travels
The USPTO says plainly that parties not affiliated with it use its public records to build websites, including any contact information you provided, and that it cannot remove information from them.
GleanMark is one of those sites. Our trademark pages show the owner's name and address as the USPTO's record lists them, because that record is how anyone checking a name finds out who owns a mark. If your address changes, change it at the USPTO first: for an application or registration filed directly with the USPTO, owner contact updates are filed in Trademark Center. Sites that copy the record show the new address only after they refresh their copy.
Before you file
- Decide whether you have an accurate mailing address that isn't your home, and use it in the mailing field.
- Enter the owner's actual domicile in the domicile field. If that address is your home, keep it out of the mailing field and every other part of the form.
- Create an email address just for USPTO correspondence.
- Leave the phone number blank unless you want it public.
- Read the form summary for any stray address, ID number or personal detail before you sign.
For everything else the application asks for, from the account you need to the fee per class, see the USPTO trademark guide.
Rules as published by the USPTO and in the TMEP, checked October 12, 2026. This article explains public USPTO rules and is not legal advice.