Singapore Patent: IPOS Buys Applicants Another Year on the fee-free-18-Month Extension

Key Takeaways

Pilot extended one year, to 31 August 2027, for original deadlines falling between 01 September 2024 and 31 August 2027.
Worth up to S$3,600 per application in waived extension fees, though the search/examination fee itself is still payable.
File before your original deadline lapses, not after, to avoid the “Abandoned (EOT possible)” status on the public register.
If you have 15+ claims, use the extra time to prune them before filing, to sidestep the higher excess claims fee now in force.
Best used with a plan: a specific overseas outcome or commercial milestone to wait for, not deferral for its own sake.

Protect Your Singapore Patent

What this is actually worth to you

It is worth putting a number on this, because the original circular does not. A standard extension of time at IPOS costs S$200 per month, capped at 18 months, so the maximum fee waived under this pilot is S$3,600 per application. For a firm managing a portfolio of twenty or thirty Singapore applications, that is a meaningful line item disappearing from the budget, not a rounding error.

How the mechanics actually work

The default deadline to request search and/or examination in Singapore is 36 months from the earliest priority date (or the filing date, if no priority is claimed), subject to the usual exceptions under the Patents Rules. Under the pilot, an eligible applicant can push that out by 18 months, for free, covering requests under section 29(1)(b) for combined search and examination, and sections 29(1)(c) or 29(3) for examination alone.

One nuance worth flagging. The waiver only covers the extension-of-time fee. You will still pay the ordinary search and/or examination fee when you eventually file that request, and this pilot does not stack with, or substitute for, other IPOS fee concessions you might separately qualify for.

If you already used a shorter extension, say six months, you are not locked out. The pilot tops you up to the full 18 months rather than replacing what you already have, so you would only need to cover the remaining twelve months to reach the cap, fee-free.

Where our clients are actually finding value

On paper this reads as a compliance footnote. In practice, the extra 18 months is a genuinely useful lever for anyone running a multi-jurisdiction portfolio. We are seeing clients use the breathing room to:

hold off on Singapore prosecution spend until they know whether the invention is commercially worth pursuing;

watch how licensing talks or product launches develop before deciding how hard to push;

let corresponding applications in the US, China, or Europe run further ahead, then react to what those offices actually say; and

bank a favourable examination result overseas first, then bring it into Singapore through a Patent Prosecution Highway request, so the Singapore examiner starts from a position of strength rather than a blank file.

Put simply: if you do not need a Singapore result urgently, there is very little reason not to use this window. The applicants getting the least value from it tend to be the ones who file the extension reflexively, without a plan for what happens at month 17.

Two traps we keep seeing

First, eligibility rides on your original deadline, not your current one. If a previous extension has already pushed your deadline into the 2024–2027 window, that alone does not make an otherwise ineligible application eligible. IPOS is looking at where the clock started, not where it happens to sit today.

Second, and this is the one that catches people out: you can file the extension request after your original deadline has technically passed, but do not plan on it. Once that original deadline lapses without a request on file, the application’s status on the public register flips to “Abandoned (EOT possible)” while you are still inside the window to fix it. It is recoverable, but it is a status your client, or your due-diligence counterparty in an M&A deal, will see and ask uncomfortable questions about. File the extension before the deadline, not after.

A third trap that has nothing to do with this circular, but will bite you anyway

If your application has more than 15 claims and you have not yet requested examination, the 18-month extension does not shield you from IPOS’s excess claims fee increase, which took effect 01 September 2025. That change already applies to any request for examination filed from that date onward, regardless of whether you got there via this pilot or the ordinary timeline. The fee per excess claim over 15 doubled to S$80. If you are sitting on the extra 18 months specifically to think things through, use some of that time to prune your claim set before you file, rather than being surprised by the excess claims bill on top of the standard examination fee.

Our take

This is a low-risk, high-value housekeeping move for almost any applicant with a live Singapore case. There is no downside to filing the extension request itself, it costs nothing, and it preserves optionality. The judgment call is entirely about what you do with the extra time: applicants who go in with a clear trigger for when they will actually file, a specific overseas outcome, a licensing milestone, a funding round, tend to get real value out of it. Applicants who file it and forget about it just end up back here in 18 months, no better informed than they are today.

If you have Singapore applications with search or examination deadlines between now and August 2027, this is worth a portfolio review rather than a case-by-case decision. Get in touch with our Singapore patent team to map out which applications qualify, and whether deferring makes sense for your commercial timeline.