Patents Expiring in 2036

274 U.S. utility patents tracked by PatentCliff are scheduled to lose protection in 2036. That count comes directly from USPTO records using the standard 20-years-from-earliest-non-provisional-filing rule, with Patent Term Adjustments and Patent Term Extensions applied where the federal record specifies them.

IBM leads with 15 patents, followed by Google (10), Toyota (9), Samsung (6). Concentrated expirations in a single assignee often track to a specific product family — pharmaceutical compound families, semiconductor process generations, or consumer electronics platforms tend to cluster.

When a patent expires, the technology it covers enters the public domain. Anyone can manufacture, use, or sell products based on the expired patent without licensing or royalty payments. For drug patents specifically, expiration is a precondition for generic competition — but FDA-granted exclusivities can extend market protection past patent expiry, and method-of-use patents may remain in force even after the compound patent expires. For non-drug patents, expiration is more straightforward and typically translates into immediate competitive entry.

The expiration dates shown reflect the current USPTO record as of 2026-04-10. Dates can shift in two ways: USPTO can grant a Patent Term Adjustment correcting for prosecution delays, or the manufacturer can secure a Hatch-Waxman Patent Term Extension on a drug patent that compensates for FDA review time. Both adjustments appear in the federal record and are reflected here when present. Always confirm against the live USPTO record before making a downstream decision.

Every patent in the table below carries its USPTO patent number. You can verify any individual patent through USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov), Google Patents, or — for drugs — the FDA Orange Book listings. The federal source is always authoritative; this page is a structured presentation of those records, not an independent calculation.