The Section 8 declaration deadline, explained

A US trademark registration is not permanent. It has to be maintained, and the first maintenance filing catches more registrants than any other: the Section 8 declaration of continued use.

Miss it and the USPTO cancels the registration. Not suspends — cancels. You would have to apply again from scratch, with a new filing date, behind anyone who filed in the meantime.

The timing

Under 15 U.S.C. §1058, the first Section 8 declaration is due:

• Between the fifth and sixth anniversary of the registration date, and
• With a six-month grace period after that, for an additional fee.

The window opens at year five. It does not open earlier — filing at year four accomplishes nothing. After year six plus the grace period, the registration is cancelled and cannot be revived.

Then it repeats. A combined Section 8 and Section 9 filing is due between the ninth and tenth anniversaries, and every ten years after that. Section 9 is the renewal itself; Section 8 is the ongoing proof you're still using the mark.

What you're actually filing

A Section 8 declaration says, under penalty of perjury, that the mark is still in use in commerce on the goods and services in the registration. You file:

• The declaration itself,
• A specimen showing current use for each class, and
• The fee, per class.

The specimen is where filings go wrong. It has to show the mark as actually used in commerce on those goods — a product label, packaging, a screenshot of a live sales page. A logo on its own, a business card, or a mockup is not use in commerce.

If you've stopped using it on some goods

Register broadly, use narrowly, and the Section 8 is where that catches up with you. If you no longer use the mark on some listed goods, you delete them from the registration.

That's not optional. Declaring continued use for goods you've abandoned is a false statement in a sworn filing, and it can expose the whole registration to a fraud challenge. Deleting the dead goods is routine; overstating use is not.

If your non-use is temporary and excusable — not just a lapse in sales — there's a mechanism for that, but it requires explanation, not silence.

Nobody is going to remind you

The USPTO does not send a maintenance reminder you can rely on. Courtesy email reminders exist, but they go to the correspondence address on file, which is frequently a former attorney, a defunct address, or an inbox nobody reads five years later.

Five to six years is also long enough for the person who handled the registration to have left, the outside counsel to have changed, and the docketing spreadsheet to have been lost in a laptop refresh. It is one of the most reliably missed deadlines in US practice, and the failure mode is total.

What to do about it

Whatever system you use, the requirements are the same:

1. Compute the dates from the registration date, not from a memory of when you filed.
2. Diary the window opening at year five, not the closing date — you want months of runway, not a scramble.
3. Get real reminders, escalating as the date approaches.
4. Check the specimen early. Discovering you have no usable specimen the week it's due is a bad week.

Thorgate computes Section 8 and Section 9 dates from your actual registration record, carries the statutory citation alongside each one, and reminds you at 60, 30, 14, 7, and 1 day out. You can also subscribe to the whole docket as a private calendar feed, so the dates sit in the calendar you already look at.

To see what's already computed for a mark you own, run its number through our free status lookup.