The USPTO Has Struck 100,000 Unused Goods and Services. Here Is How a Founder Can Ask for One.

On September 30, 2026, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that it "has now canceled more than 100,000 unused goods and services from trademark registrations." The tools it used are two procedures that many business owners have never heard of: expungement and reexamination.

Most of the cleanup was the office's own work. But anyone can ask for one of these reviews, for $400 per class in government fees. For a founder whose application is blocked by a registration that nobody seems to use, that is the part of the announcement worth knowing.

What the office announced

The announcement, in the office's words: "Through expungement and reexamination proceedings, the USPTO removed goods or services from registrations based on evidence that they were never used in commerce or were not in use by a required deadline." It added that "most of these proceedings target registrations connected to specimen farm websites, fake storefronts created by bad faith filing firms," and that "while most proceedings were Director-initiated, you can also request an expungement or reexamination proceeding."

A "specimen" is the proof of use an applicant files to show a mark is really on products for sale. The office describes specimen farms as websites "made up of webpages created to display hundreds of products with various trademarks that appear to be for sale," built so that unused marks could pass as used. Its own warning about them: "Unless these improper registrations are canceled, they can block other applicants from registering their trademarks."

The two procedures, in plain terms

A U.S. registration lists the goods and services it covers, item by item. Congress added two quick ways to strike items the owner was not entitled to keep. Both became available in December 2021.

• Expungement removes items the mark was never used on at all. It can be requested between three and ten years after the registration date, and it is the only one of the two that works against registrations that came in through the international Madrid system.
• Reexamination removes items that were not in use by a key date: the filing date, for an application based on use, or for an application filed on an intent to use, the date the owner filed its proof of use, if it filed before approval, or otherwise the date its last deadline to file that proof ran out. It can be requested within the first five years after registration, and only for registrations based on use in the U.S.

Either way, the office looks at the evidence, and if the owner cannot show use, the items come off. If every item comes off, the registration is canceled.

What the register shows

We counted these cases in our copy of the USPTO register, case by case, using the event entries the office records on each file. One note on units before the numbers: the office counts individual goods and services removed. We count whole registrations. A registration can lose one item or forty, so the two numbers are not comparable and should not be divided into each other.

Since 2022, 5,009 registrations have been canceled through expungement or reexamination. Nearly all of them are reexaminations (4,864).

Who started the case:

• 4,687 (93.6%) were started by the office itself, with no outside request on file.
• 263 (5.3%) started with a request from someone outside the office.
• 59 (1.2%) had both.

That matches the office's own description, and its own figures point the same way: through May 2025, 89% of the goods and services it removed came from cases the office started itself.

To check that we were reading the register correctly, we compared our counts with the figures in a June 2025 USPTO presentation covering December 2021 through May 2025. The office reported 296 expungement requests and 312 reexamination requests from outside parties; our register shows 300 and 314 for the same period. The office reported 24 expungements and 2,574 reexaminations started on its own; we show 24 and 2,541.

Have cancellations "more than doubled in just over a year"?

The announcement says the cancellations "have more than doubled in just over a year." Measured from the office's May 8, 2025 announcement that it had passed 50,000 goods and services, that holds. By our count the registrations canceled went from 2,167 that day to 5,009 by September 30, 2026, a 2.3x increase. That stretch is nearly 17 months.

Measured another way, the pace is steady rather than rising. Registrations canceled from January through September 2026 came to 1,646, against 1,591 in the same months of 2025. The big jump came in 2025, which was three times 2024. This year has held that level. Both readings are true. The running total doubled; the yearly pace did not.

This is not the only cleanup

The 100,000 figure covers these two procedures only. Separately, on August 6, 2025, the office sanctioned a foreign filing firm and, in its words, "terminated over 52,000 applications and registrations connected to the firm." In our register, 40,823 registrations were canceled through that reconsideration process in July 2025, and 2,357 more have been canceled the same way in 2026. None of them overlap with the 5,009 above. Measured in registrations, that single sanctions track removed far more than expungement and reexamination have.

Anyone can ask. Few do.

Requests from outside the office have stayed small. Counting requests received, expungement and reexamination together:

The July to September 2026 quarter had 77, the most of any quarter so far, though 19 of those were aimed at one owner's registrations.

Here is what one of those requests did.

The NUTRIHARVEST case

NutriHarvest, Inc. of Albany, New York applied on December 31, 2024 to register NUTRIHARVEST for goods including honey, maple syrup, pickles and millet.

On July 1, 2025, the office refused the application under the likelihood-of-confusion rule, which blocks a new mark when buyers would probably mistake it for one already registered. The registration in the way was an earlier NUTRIHARVEST, Registration No. 7,440,733, for dietary supplements. Its owner on the register is an individual in Guangzhou, China. That registration had been filed in June 2023, approved without a single objection from the examiner, and registered in July 2024.

Then the record moves quickly:

• December 16, 2025: NutriHarvest answers the refusal. In its response it tells the office, in its lawyers' words, "Applicant has filed a Petition for Reexamination as to U.S. Registration No. 7440733 and requests suspension of this application pending the outcome of the Petition for Reexamination." The office records the request the same day.
• January 12, 2026: NutriHarvest's application is suspended, put on hold, "Pending Expungement/Reexamination Proceeding" on the blocking registration.
• February 26, 2026: the office opens the reexamination.
• June 4, 2026: the office ends the case and cancels the blocking registration in full.
• July 22, 2026: NutriHarvest's application is approved for publication, 48 days later.
• August 18, 2026: the application is published, the window in which anyone can object before a mark registers.
• October 6, 2026: the application registers, Registration No. 8481687.

From the request to the cancellation took 170 days, and to NutriHarvest's own registration, 294 days. Across all 263 registrations canceled through an outside request alone, the middle value was 206 days. The office's own estimate is 4.5 to 12 months.

When this route fits, and when it does not

It fits when an application is refused because of an earlier registration, and there is real reason to think that owner never sold the listed products. The office's own example for reexamination: "You might choose to petition for reexamination if you notice that the specimen for the registered trademark that's blocking your application was filed before the trademark was actually being used in commerce."

It does not fit when the owner is actually selling. Then the refusal is a question of whether the two marks conflict, answered by argument, by narrowing what you sell, or by asking the other owner to agree in writing that both can exist.

What a request involves, per the office's own pages:

• Timing. Reexamination within the first five years after registration. Expungement between three and ten years after it. A registration from December 2023, for example, can be reexamined through December 2028 and expunged from December 2026 through December 2033.
• Cost. A $400 government fee per class. Starting a cancellation case at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, the office's internal court, costs $600 per class. Lawyer fees are separate in both cases.
• Evidence. A sworn statement describing a "reasonable investigation," the evidence itself (including searches that came up empty) and an index of it. The evidence has to come with the request.
• Who can file. "Any person," and in most cases without naming the real client. Filers based outside the U.S. need a U.S. attorney.
• What happens next. Once the office opens a case, the filer steps out. It becomes the owner against the office. A request cannot be withdrawn, and a decision not to open a case is final.
• The odds. In its June 2025 presentation, the office said it opened 60% of outside requests, and that 75% of opened cases that had been decided ended in cancellation.

The practical move

When a refusal cites a registration you have never heard of, look it up before you rename or pay for an argument. Who owns it, where are they, and can you find the product for sale anywhere. If the honest answer is that nobody sells it, the cheapest path past the refusal may be asking the office to take a second look.

For more on how refusals work and what answering one involves, see Refusals 101 and how often arguing back succeeds.

Method

Sources: the USPTO bulletin of September 30, 2026; the USPTO milestone pages of December 13, 2024 and May 2025; the USPTO pages on requesting expungement or reexamination and on specimen farms; the USPTO fee schedule; and the USPTO presentation "Experienced practitioners: Trademark ex parte expungement and reexamination proceedings" (June 2025). Register counts come from GleanMark's copy of the USPTO register, using the event entries the office records for requests received, cases opened, case endings and cancellations under Sections 16A and 16B. Cancellations are counted as distinct registrations; requests and cases opened are counted as individual entries. Counts run through September 29, 2026 for cancellations and October 2, 2026 for requests. A notice that a case has ended does not by itself mean a registration was canceled; we counted only cancellation entries. Our data cannot count individual goods and services.