On October 9, 2019, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced via an e-mail to its stakeholders and in a post on the Director's Form Blog that the Office had achieved its long-term goals of reducing first action pendency to less than 15 months and reducing total pendency to less than 24 months for the 2019 fiscal year (see chart below).  The Office noted that it averaged 14.7 months for first action pendency and 23.8 months for total pendency for the fiscal year, which ended on September 30, which "marks the USPTO's lowest first action pendency since January 2002, despite total application filings nearly doubling in that time, from 353,000 in FY 2002 to 667,000 in FY 2019."

In its FY 2018 Performance and Accountability Report, the Office had established targets of 14.5 months for first action pendency and 23.8 months for total pendency (see "USPTO Releases Performance and Accountability Report for FY 2018").  For FY2018, the Office had achieved an average first action pendency of 15.8 months and an average total pendency of 23.8 months.

In announcing that the Office had met its goals to reduce patent examination pendency, the Office indicated that at the same time, it had "maintained and indeed improved the quality of our examination."  The Office also noted that the efforts of its employees on increasing efficiencies to accelerate the overall patent examination process had resulted in, for example, a decrease in the average processing time for an amendment filed in a patent application from 26.2 days to 6.8 days.

The Office pointed out that it will now "redouble our efforts to optimize pendency using considered analytics that make sense," including improving how cases are routed to examiners and how examination time is allocated to examiners.  With respect to first action pendency, the Office will now "strive to meet in as many cases as possible the time frames outlined by the patent term adjustment statute (35 U.S.C. 154b)," which means issuing a first office action in no more than 14 months.