UPC: United States Patent Classification

UPC stands for United States Patent Classification and is an additional categorization system for US patents. Like IPC, CPC and other classification systems, UPC is used to group and classify patents in an orderly manner.

It is a hierarchical system made up of numbers and based on a two-level structure “Class/Subclass”. The class will allow identification of the technology area of the subject matter while the subclass takes into account process, structural and functional features related to the technology area encompassed within the Class.

Even though UPC has a similar structure to IPC system, there are some key differences reported in the below table.

More than one classification system can be allocated to one patent, therefore, there is a necessity for the USPTO to have a concordance table for the IPC and UPC.