How we know when a patent dies
Every date on this site is computed, not looked up in a legal filing. Here's the math, its blind spots, and why we publish it anyway.
The corpus
13,862 US patents currently classified under CPC G06Q 40/04 (securities/commodities trading, exchanges) or G06Q 40/06 (portfolio/investment management), built from USPTO Open Data Portal bulk datasets: granted-patent core, current CPC classifications, applications, disambiguated assignees, and maintenance-fee events (vintage 2026-04-10 for the patent data, cumulative through 2026-06-30 for maintenance fees). Payment patents (G06Q 20/*) and insurance patents (G06Q 40/08) are excluded.
The term-expiry estimate
For filings on or after June 8, 1995: filing date + 20 years. For earlier filings, the later of grant date + 17 years or filing date + 20 years (the transitional rule from the GATT/TRIPS-era change to US patent term). If a filing date was unavailable, we fall back to grant date + 17 years (pre-1995 grants) or + 20 years (later grants).
Specifically, this estimate does not know about: patent-term adjustments (PTA) for examination delay, patent-term extensions (PTE, common for pharmaceuticals, rare in this corpus), or terminal disclaimers that can shorten a term to match a related patent. Real expiry can differ from our estimate in either direction. Always confirm against USPTO's Patent Term Calculator or PAIR before relying on a specific date for anything consequential.
Status categories
Active — term has not run out and no maintenance-fee lapse is on record. Lapsed (fees) — a maintenance-fee event marked expired for nonpayment, dated before our term-expiry estimate; this takes precedence over term expiry because the fee lapse is the actual cause of death, and it usually happens years early. Expired (term) — the patent ran its full course and expired on schedule.
Why publish estimates instead of waiting for certainty
Patent status isn't published anywhere as a single live feed — it has to be computed from public filings, the way we've done here. We'd rather show our work and hedge honestly than pretend to a precision the underlying data doesn't support. Every patent detail page repeats this disclaimer for exactly that reason.