Your renewal invoices are getting bigger. The UK IPO raised patent, trademark and design fees by around 25% on average from April 1, 2026. The USPTO increased fees 7 to 8% in January 2025. The EPO has raised fees by an average of 5% since 2024.*
These increases keep coming, and they land on your maintenance budget whether your portfolio grew this year or not.
So, the real question is: which assets are worth paying more to keep, and can your IP system can show you where your portfolio is at any point in time?
A growing focus on quality over quantity
"Companies are taking an increasingly strategic approach to portfolio maintenance," says Aileen Buchanan, SVP of IP Services at Anaqua. "The focus has shifted from quantity to quality."
In practice, corporate IP teams are doing four things:
- Pruning: shedding assets that cost more to maintain than they return
- Prioritizing: directing renewal spend toward high-value families first
- Forecasting: projecting maintenance costs from actual portfolio data
- Reporting: knowing what's being paid, and when, at any point in the year
All four depend on accurate data that's easy to get to. Spreadsheets and fragmented vendor reports don't hold up when the board asks why IP spend went up again.
How some IP teams are stretching their budgets further
As renewal fees continue to rise, many IP teams are looking beyond portfolio pruning alone. They're finding ways to reduce the cost of managing renewals and filings while also gaining better visibility into where their IP budgets are being spent.
Many Anaqua customers achieve both by combining Anaqua IP Services with their AQX® or RightHub® IP management platform. The result is significant savings on renewal and annuity processing costs, along with a centralized view of payments, filings, deadlines, and portfolio activity. That combination helps IP teams make the most of limited budgets, while maintaining confidence that high-value assets remain protected.
How you can save with Anaqua IP Services
Up to 30% reduction in renewal processing costs. Anaqua IP Services manages over 2 million IP rights and processes more than 1 million renewal payments each year. That volume is what lets corporate IP teams typically cut current renewal processing costs by up to 30%. On a portfolio of any size, that's budget you can put toward protecting high-value assets or filing in new markets.
A team that works as part of yours. Alongside the savings, you get a service team that acts as an extension of your IP function: experienced people using purpose-built technology.
Choose the services your team requires. Pick the IP services that fit your team's immediate and long-term needs, including renewals, foreign filing, docketing and paralegal support, online brand protection, data validation and portfolio onboarding, and leave the rest.
Know what you're paying, and why. Transparent pricing means no surprises on the invoice. With more than 30 years of IP payment experience and ISO 9001 certification since 1997, Anaqua tracks fee schedule changes, jurisdictional deadlines and country-specific requirements so your team doesn't have to.
International filing support, without starting over. For teams with international portfolios, filing support covers PCT national phase entry, EP validation and unitary patent, and direct Paris Convention filing. In most cases, you can keep the foreign filing agents you already work with. Dedicated service teams get to know your portfolio, so you don't have to re-explain it every time something needs attention.
See where every portfolio maintenance dollar goes
When you pair Anaqua IP Services with the AQX® or RightHub® IP platform, completed payments and filings sync directly to the docket your team already works from. There's no separate portal to check and nothing to reconcile by hand. Your team can see where every maintenance dollar is going. Once spend, deadlines and portfolio data live in one place, you can compare what you're paying against what matters to the business. You can then decide renewals on business value, well before deadlines force the call, and show the board exactly what you've saved.
Making the case to the board
Rising costs are easier to defend when you can show exactly where the money is going and why. With all portfolio activity, costs and deadlines in one system, your team can produce board-ready reporting without a quarterly data scramble.
It also makes pruning easier. When you can see the full cost of maintaining an asset alongside its business relevance, decisions about what to keep or cut are quicker and easier to justify.
Where AI fits into IP budget planning
The AI capabilities built into the IP lifecycle on AQX and RightHub help your team spend less time on manual tasks and more time on reporting and analysis that informs decisions. Seeing cost trends and portfolio value side by side makes it quicker to justify spend on high-value assets and to drop the ones that aren't earning their renewal fee. AI can also bring greater context to filing and investment decisions by helping teams identify technology gaps, evaluate competitive patent activity, surface emerging opportunities, and assess how new inventions align with business priorities. That means more informed decisions about where to invest, what to protect, what to maintain, and where to focus resources for the greatest strategic impact.
Reach out to talk about real solutions
Fees will keep rising and portfolios will keep getting more complex. A cheaper vendor or a standalone IP management system only gets you part of the way. The biggest gains come from bringing IP software, services, and portfolio intelligence together in a single operating model.
→ Get in touch today, and we'll help you work out the right mix of IP services and software for your portfolio and budget.
→ And if renewal and filing costs are the priority right now, request a quote based on your portfolio volume to see what you could save.
*Fee increases:
- New fees from 1 April 2026 for designs, trade marks and patents - GOV.UK
- Summary of 2025 patent fee changes | USPTO
- EPO | Official fee adjustments effective 1 April 2026 - Lexology