A U.S. design patent lasts 15 years from the date of grant. The rule is set by a single sentence of statute. Section 173 of Title 35 of the U.S. Code provides: "Patents for designs shall be granted for the term of 15 years from the date of grant." Two features of that sentence distinguish the design term from the more familiar utility-patent term, and both matter for anyone tracking how long a consumer-product design right will remain in force.

The first feature is the length: 15 years, not 20. The second is the starting point: the term is measured from the date of grant — the day the patent issues — not from the filing date of the application. A utility patent, by contrast, runs 20 years from the earliest non-provisional U.S. filing date to which it claims priority. That difference in the measuring point is consequential. Because a design patent's clock starts at issuance rather than filing, time spent in examination does not erode the enforceable term the way pendency erodes a utility patent's effective life.

"Patents for designs shall be granted for the term of 15 years from the date of grant."— 35 U.S.C. § 173, source

Why the term is 15 years, and what it was before

The 15-year figure reflects a specific change in U.S. law. For design patents issued from applications filed before May 13, 2015, the term was 14 years from grant. The shift to 15 years took effect when the United States implemented the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs; design applications filed on or after May 13, 2015 carry the 15-year term. The statutory text in § 173 today reads "15 years," and its revision history records the amendments — including the change tied to the Patent Law Treaties Implementation Act of 2012 — that brought it to its current form. The practical rule for current filings is unambiguous: 15 years from grant.

A second practical distinction is that design patents do not require maintenance fees. Utility patents must have maintenance fees paid at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after grant, or they expire early; a patentee can let a utility patent lapse by simply not paying. Design patents have no such schedule. Once granted, a design patent remains enforceable for its full 15-year term without further periodic payments. That makes the design term not only shorter but more predictable — there is no mid-life lapse mechanism to track.

What the term means for consumer-device design rights

For the consumer-electronics record, the 15-year-from-grant term shapes how long the ornamental appearance of a product stays protected. A design patent covering the look of a phone, a wearable, an earbud, or an on-screen graphical user interface protects that appearance — under the appearance-only scope set by 35 U.S.C. § 171 — for 15 years from the day it issues. Because consumer-hardware design cycles are short relative to that window, a single granted design patent typically outlives the commercial life of the specific product it was filed on, and continues to cover the protected appearance against later look-alike articles for the remainder of the term.

It is worth being precise about what the term does and does not measure. The 15 years run from grant regardless of when the underlying application was filed, so two design patents filed in the same year can expire in different years if they issued in different years. The term is also independent of the utility patents a company may hold on the same product: a device can be covered simultaneously by utility patents running 20 years from filing and by design patents running 15 years from grant, and those two clocks expire on entirely separate dates. When coverage states that a product's "patent" is about to expire, the accurate question is which patent — because for a design patent the answer is governed entirely by § 173's 15-years-from-grant rule, and for a utility patent it is governed by the separate 20-years-from-filing regime.

A related distinction is that design patents are not subject to patent term adjustment or patent term extension in the way utility patents can be. A utility patent's 20-years-from-filing term can be lengthened by patent term adjustment to compensate for USPTO examination delay, and in limited regulated fields by patent term extension. The design term is simpler: 15 years from grant, full stop, with no day-for-day adjustment machinery layered on top. That simplicity is a direct consequence of measuring from grant rather than from filing — there is no pendency for the term to compensate, because pendency happens before the clock starts. A company can also hold a series of design patents on successive product generations, each with its own 15-year clock running from its own grant date, so a product line's design protection is staggered across many separate expiration dates rather than concentrated on one.

The bottom line is fixed by the statute itself. A U.S. design patent is granted for 15 years from the date of grant, requires no maintenance fees, takes no term adjustment, and — for any design application filed on or after May 13, 2015 — carries that 15-year term rather than the 14-year term that preceded it. Everything else about a design patent's enforceability follows from when it issued. To find when a specific design patent expires, the only inputs you need are its grant date and the 15-year rule in § 173 — add fifteen years to the issue date printed on the face of the patent, and that is the date the ornamental design enters the public domain.