← TM Watch — free instant similarity check

Your mark was published for opposition. Here is what the next 30 days look like.

Every Tuesday the USPTO publishes a new issue of the Trademark Official Gazette. Being listed in it is good news — the examining attorney has approved your application — but it also opens a fixed window in which anyone who believes they would be harmed by your registration can file to stop it. The same window is your chance to stop someone else's confusingly-similar mark. This page explains the mechanics with the numbers taken from the USPTO's own fee schedule, dated to the day we read it. It is not legal advice.

The timeline

1. Day 0 — publication. Your mark appears in that week's Official Gazette issue (applications section). Your TSDR status changes to published for opposition. Nothing is mailed to competitors; the only way anyone learns about it is by reading the issue or running a watch.
2. Days 1–30 — the opposition period. Any person or company that believes it would be damaged by the registration may file a notice of opposition with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB), or ask for more time to decide.
3. Extensions. A potential opposer can ask for extra time before the 30 days run out. The first 30-day extension is granted on request ($0 (no fee)); a further request up to 90 days from the original deadline costs $200; a final 60-day request, which needs consent or extraordinary circumstances, costs $400. The total is capped at 180 days from the publication date.
4. If nobody opposes. A use-based application (or one that has already shown use) proceeds to registration; an intent-to-use application gets a Notice of Allowance and you then have to prove use. Either way the window closes quietly — you will not be told that nobody objected.
5. If somebody opposes. The TTAB opens a proceeding that looks like a slimmed-down civil case: pleadings, discovery, evidence, briefs. Most oppositions settle or are withdrawn, but the ones that go the distance take a year or more.

What it costs (TTAB fees, electronic filing)

Source: USPTO fee schedule, effective 2025-01-19, read by us on 2026-09-03. Attorney fees are on top of these and are usually the larger number.

Why the window is the whole point of a trademark watch

Opposing a published application is the cheap moment. After it registers, the same objection becomes a petition to cancel — same fee per class, but now you are arguing against a presumptively valid registration, and every month it sits there the other side is building rights by use. The problem is that the 30 days start on a date you were never told about. A watch is just someone (or something) reading every Tuesday's issue against your mark so the clock never runs out unnoticed.

You can do this by hand: the Gazette is public, and this site's newly published marks by class pages list every word mark from each issue. Doing it every week for years is the part people stop doing.

Check right now, free

Type your mark into the instant similarity check — it runs in your browser against 361,260 word marks from the Official Gazette back to 2026-05-05 (applications published for opposition and registrations issued) with edit-distance, phonetic and shared-rare-word matching. Every hit links to the mark's live USPTO status page, where the publication date and therefore the opposition deadline are shown.

If YOUR application is the one being opposed

You will get a notice from the TTAB with an answer deadline. Do not ignore it — a default ends the application. This is the point where talking to a trademark attorney stops being optional; the services we compare include two that come with a lawyer on the other end, and we say plainly when they are the better buy.