Your Trademark Can Expire. Here's What Keeps It Alive.

The registration certificate arrives, you frame it, and you assume the work is done.

It isn't. A federal trademark registration is one of the few business assets that can quietly disappear while you're still using it every day — not because someone challenged you, but because a date passed. Marks are cancelled for missed maintenance every year, and the owners almost never see it coming. Here's what the clock actually looks like. For help with a mark you already own, see our trademark practice.

Two things keep a registration alive

You have to keep using it, and you have to tell the USPTO you're still using it, on their schedule. Miss either one and the registration is vulnerable.

Those are separate obligations. Plenty of owners are actively selling under their mark and still lose it, because nobody filed the paperwork.

The deadlines, in plain terms

• Between years 5 and 6 — a declaration confirming the mark is still in use in commerce, filed with a specimen showing real-world use. This is the one that catches people, because it lands years after anyone was thinking about the trademark.
• At year 10, and every 10 years after — a combined renewal and continued-use filing.
• Grace periods exist, but they're short and they cost more. They are not a plan.

There's also an optional filing available after five years of continuous use that makes the registration substantially harder to attack. It isn't required, and skipping it costs you nothing today — but it's one of the better values in trademark practice, and most owners never hear about it. Worth asking about when your five-year mark approaches.

Stopping use is its own risk

Maintenance filings only work if the underlying use is real. If you stop using a mark in commerce with no intent to resume, it can be treated as abandoned — and after roughly three years of non-use, the law presumes exactly that.

That matters for brands that pause. A product line you shelve "for now," a service you stop offering, a name you rebrand away from but want to keep parked — those are the situations where a registration quietly stops being defensible even though the certificate is still on the wall.

What the USPTO is doing about it

The office has been tightening enforcement on registrations claiming broader use than actually exists, including auditing maintenance filings and requiring additional proof. A declaration that overstates which goods or services you're really selling under the mark isn't a technicality — these filings are signed under penalty of perjury, and an inaccurate one can put the whole registration at risk.

The practical version: claim what you actually sell, and be able to prove it.

What to do with this

• Put your dates in a docketing system, not a mental note. The 5-to-6 year window arrives long after the filing is out of mind.
• Keep evidence of use as you go — dated packaging, tags, listings, screenshots. Reconstructing five-year-old proof is miserable.
• Tell your attorney when your use changes — dropping a product line, changing how the mark appears, or pausing sales all affect what you can properly declare.
• Don't assume a reminder is coming. Official-looking notices about your registration are frequently scams; the real deadlines are yours to track.

When to call ELN

If you have a registration and you're not certain when its next deadline falls, that's worth an hour of someone's attention now rather than a cancellation notice later. The filings themselves are routine — the expensive part is discovering the window closed. ELN Law handles trademark maintenance and portfolio docketing for Michigan businesses, including marks originally filed elsewhere. Reach out through our trademark practice or schedule a consultation.

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