Increase in Court Fees before the UPC, Effective January1st, 2026:
By a decision dated November 4, 2025, the Administrative Committee of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) approved an increase in the Court fees that shall be paid by parties when filing an infringement or revocation action regarding a European patent or Unitary patent (or when filing a counterclaim on such grounds) before the UPC.
While the principles and methods for calculating the Court fees remain unchanged (with fixed fees, which are always due and depend on the nature of the case, and value-based fees, which are possibly due for infringement actions and depend on the value of the dispute), the amounts of the Court fees have been substantially increased, with a rise of approximately 33%. Below are some examples:
To justify these increases, which also apply to fees payable before the Court of Appeal (including a further 10% rise in fixed fees), the UPC refers, on the one hand, to inflation since 2016 – the year the previous fee schedule was established – and, on the other hand, to an undervaluation of the work required for certain procedures, such as applications to preserve evidence.
The new Table of Court fees, will apply to all actions and claims filed as from January 1st, 2026, including for pending actions.
The significant increase in Court fees, combined with the substantial attorneys and lawyers’ fees, concentrated over a short period of time, due to the speed of the proceedings, could lead some applicants to favor national filing strategies under judicial systems that do not impose Court fees and allow for costs to be spread out, over a longer timeframe, such as the French system.