The USPTO is "unique among federal agencies because it operates solely on fees collected by its users, and not on taxpayer dollars".

[7] Its "operating structure is like a business in that it receives requests for services—applications for patents and trademark registrations—and charges fees projected to cover the cost of performing the services [it] provide[s]".

[10] The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.The USPTO maintains a permanent, interdisciplinary historical record of all U.S. patent applications in order to fulfill objectives outlined in the United States Constitution.

[7] The PTO's mission is to promote "industrial and technological progress in the United States and strengthen the national economy" by: The USPTO is headquartered at the Alexandria Campus, consisting of 11 buildings in a city-like development surrounded by ground floor retail and high rise residential buildings between the Metro stations of King Street station (the main search building is two blocks due south of the King Street station) and Eisenhower Avenue station where the actual Alexandria Campus is located between Duke Street (on the North) to Eisenhower Avenue (on the South), and between John Carlyle Street (on the East) to Elizabeth Lane (on the West) in Alexandria, Virginia.

The USPTO was expected by 2014 to open its first ever satellite offices in Detroit, Dallas, Denver, and Silicon Valley to reduce backlog and reflect regional industrial strengths.

[15][16][17][18][19] In 2013, due to the budget sequestration, the satellite office for Silicon Valley, which is home to one of the nation's top patent-producing cities, was put on hold.

[20] However, renovation and infrastructure updates continued after the sequestration, and the Silicon Valley location opened in the San Jose City Hall in 2015.

[21] As of September 30, 2009[update], the end of the U.S. government's fiscal year, the PTO had 9,716 employees, nearly all of whom are based at its five-building headquarters complex in Alexandria.

[22] While the agency has noticeably grown in recent years, the rate of growth was far slower in fiscal 2009 than in the recent past; this is borne out by data from fiscal 2005 to the present:[22] As of the end of FY 2018, the USPTO was composed of 12,579 federal employees, including 8,185 patent examiners, 579 trademark examiners, and 3,815 other staff.

[52] On December 16, 2022, Kathi Vidal announced that Vaishali Udupa,[53] an intellectual property attorney, engineer, and currently a top executive from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), will join the 13,000-person Department of Commerce agency as the new commissioner for patents effective January 17, 2023.

Patent fees represent a policy lever that influences both the number of applications submitted to the office as well as their quality.

"[88] The Expo features celebrity speakers such as Anson Williams (of the television show Happy Days)[89] and basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar[90] and has numerous trademark-holding companies as exhibitors.

[91] T. Markey is featured prominently on the Kids section of the USPTO website, alongside fellow IP mascots Ms. Pat Pending (with her robot cat GeaRS) and Mark Trademan.

[94] Any person who practices trademark law before the USPTO must be an active member in good standing of the highest court of any state.

There is also skill required when searching for prior art that is used to support the application and to prevent applying for a patent for something that may be unpatentable.

[101] Numerous free and commercial services provide patent documents in other formats, such as Adobe PDF and CPC.

Effective August 2006, the USPTO introduced an accelerated patent examination procedure in an effort to allow inventors a speedy evaluation of an application with a final disposition within twelve months.

In 2012, the USPTO initiated an internal investigation into allegations of fraud by employees taking advantage of its remote work policies.

Investigators discovered that some patent examiners had lied about the hours they had worked, but high level officials prevented access to computer records, thus limiting the number of employees who could be punished.