Everything You Never Knew You Needed to Know About the Trademark ID Manual
Rachael Dickson | January 02, 2025
Rachael Dickson is Senior Trademark Counsel at Lloyd & Mousilli, where she works with clients and consults with other trademark attorneys. Rachael worked as an examining attorney at the USPTO from 2017-2021, where she was awarded a 2020 Customer Service Award for her work on cannabis trademark applications. She directed the 2022-2024 IP and Entrepreneurship Clinic at Suffolk University School of Law as a visiting assistant professor. Her current legal research focuses on incidences of discrimination in the Trademark Identification Manual.
What is the Trademark ID Manual?
The Trademark Identification Manual is a searchable database of over 65,000 acceptable, pre-approved identifications of goods and services for applications to register trademarks at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). You can find it online here.
Benefits of the ID Manual for Applicants
Applicants who can use identifications from the ID Manual can currently save $100 per class of goods/services by using a TEAS Plus application at the USPTO, which gives them access to $250 per class fees rather than $350 per class.
As of January 18, 2025, the TEAS Plus application will be phased out and the new base fee for all trademark applications at the USPTO will be $350 per class. If you can use an ID Manual ID in your application, you can save a lot of money on fees, as applications with custom text field identifications will cost $550 per class! So it’s a really good idea to use a pre-approved manual ID if you can.
If you can use an ID from the ID Manual in your application, it often shortens the time between your mark being examined and registered. This also reduces the likelihood of you having to file a response or talk to an examiner to fix issues with the ID. So there are lots of benefits to being able to use an identification from the ID manual beyond just the savings.
Why Does the USPTO Want Us to Use the Trademark ID Manual?
The USPTO incentivizes the use of ID Manual IDs with lower fees because it makes their life a lot easier if you use pre-approved IDs. It takes much longer for examining attorneys to review and approve custom IDs than it takes for them to review pre-approved IDs which already meet all requirements.
The USPTO requires identifications of goods/services to be “definite, clear, accurate, and concise.” This level of definition is required in order to:
- Provide public notice to marks right holders (Parties need to know exactly what a good/service is before they can determine if a mark might infringe on their rights);
- Allow the USPTO to classify the goods/services correctly in the 45 classes of the Nice Classification (proper classification ensures that the Trademark Register is organized and searchable); and
- Enable the USPTO to reach informed judgments concerning the likelihood of confusion between marks on the register.
Be Classy: How IDs are Organized
Identifications of goods and services in trademark applications and registrations at the USPTO and in 149 other countries are classified using the Nice Classification system, which is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Goods identifications are divided up into Classes 1-34 and service identifications into 35-45. This system makes it easier for applicants to both search for and file applications to register trademarks in multiple jurisdictions around the world. Goods and services IDs are commonly added, deleted, modified, or moved to different classes by the Nice Committee of Experts, which meets annually at WIPO in Switzerland.
The Nice Classification groups like goods or services in a single class “to the extent possible,” according to TMEP §1401.1. However, while some classes are relatively homogenous and predictable (like Class 25, which includes clothing, footwear, and headwear), others may seem far more arbitrary to the casual viewer. For example, Class 09 includes downloadable software and audiovisual and information technology equipment, but also encompasses eyeglasses, magnets, and safety apparatuses like traffic-light apparatus or safety net.
You can look at the full list of broad class headings for each International Class online here.
How to Choose an Identification
When you choose an ID for your application to register a trademark at the USPTO, it’s incredibly important to make sure you choose a good or service you actually offer or plan to offer. While that sounds like a simple requirement, it can actually be a bit more complicated than you might think.
Let’s say that you make and sell opaque vinyl film which wraps around the outside of a car for advertising purposes. When you file your trademark application, you choose “Tinted plastic films for use on vehicle windows” from the ID Manual, which is pretty close to what you offer. However, when a trademark examiner checks over your proof of use (specimen), they’ll see that none of the goods you sell are intended for use on vehicle windows- but instead, are only for use on the painted areas of a car. Your application will then receive a specimen refusal, because the mark isn’t shown for use with the stated ID. If you aren’t actually offering the exact goods identified in your application, this error is fatal; there’s no way to fix this issue.
This is because the USPTO does not allow any changes to be made to an ID after you file. Although you can narrow the scope of an ID, the USPTO will not allow you to expand or change it. For example, if you were to file an application for the mark UNICORN PRODUCE for use with “Fresh citrus fruit,” you could later narrow this ID to “Fresh citrus fruit, namely, lemons and oranges.” However, you couldn’t broaden the ID to “Fresh fruit” (which would now encompass non-citrus fruits not initially included in the original ID) or change the ID to something altogether different, like “Fresh vegetables.”
So it’s really important to make sure the ID in your application is exactly the good/service you’re offering! Otherwise, your application could be doomed from the start.
Practical ID Manual Searching Tips
Tip #1: Learn ID manual search quirks.
The ID Manual has become more searchable and usable in recent years. While in prior times, the manual sometimes would not pull up search results based merely on the inclusion or exclusion of an “s” pluralizing a good, this issue has generally been remedied. So now, if you search “shoe” you will also pull up identifications featuring “shoes.”
However, the ID Manual can still sometimes be very picky when it comes to spacing and spelling. For example, if you search “keychain” in the manual, you’ll pull up zero results. This seems odd, as keychains are pretty common goods in the marketplace. However, if you search “key chain,” with a space in between the words, you pull up 26 results.
So if you search a common good or service in the ID Manual and get 0 results, it’s important to try other possible spellings and spacings of that wording. It’s quite likely that that good/service is there, just not under the exact spelling/spacing that you initially searched!
Tip #2: Use class numbers in searches to see all IDs.
The Trademark ID Manual includes the class number for every identification within it. If you search the 3-digit version of a class number in the ID Manual search box (e.g., searching “025” instead of “25”), you can actually pull up the full list of IDs in that class.
This can be helpful for determining what pre-approved identifications in the manual both adequately define your goods/services while providing the broadest possible protection. For example, let’s say you currently make and sell pants. While you could simply list the pre-approved ID Manual identification “pants” in your application to register your trademark, that wouldn’t cover your mark if you were to expand to making skirts in the future. But if you listed your goods as “Bottoms as clothing,” that would encompass both the pants you make now and the skirts you may want to make and sell under your mark in the future. That gives you broader protection in one single identification.
Adding in a class number can also help you narrow down a search of the trademark ID Manual. For example, if you’re making and selling digital books, but you just search “books” in the ID Manual, you pull up over 400 identifications in a variety of classes. However, if you add in 009 in your search to narrow down your identification search to only downloadable digital books, you’ll narrow your results down to 37. It’ll then be much easier for you to scroll through and find an id that describes your goods, such as “Downloadable electronic books in the field of {indicate subject matter}.”
Tip #3: Sort search results to find the most fitting ID.
There are different ways to organize your search results in the ID Manual. You can use the “sort by” function at the top of the results to achieve this.
The system automatically sorts just by “relevance.” However, “relevance” in this situation is determined by an undisclosed algorithm, and often results in a list of unrelated identifications from all different classes, in no particular order. Sometimes sorting by “Class” makes it a lot easier to see which class and identification best suits your goods or services.
You also have the ability to double sort the results by two different criteria. If you wanted, you could sort by “Class” and then by “Description”; this would list all IDs in alphabetical order by class.
You can also sort the results by clicking on any column header in the results table. For example, if you want to sort by class number, just click the “Class” column. A small arrow will appear to show if the results are in ascending or descending order, and you can click it to switch the order. This can be particularly helpful if you want to look at the ID results in the service classes (Classes 35-45) before the results in the goods classes (Classes 1-34).
Tip #4: Check the timeliness of identifications before using them.
Did you know that the ID Manual tells you when each identification was added to the manual? This is called the effective date. The USPTO, in talks with the wider international community, regularly makes changes to the level of definiteness required for an ID.
However, if the ID in your application was live and effective as of the time you filed, the USPTO won’t require you to be more definite than that, even if they change the requirement for definiteness while your application is pending.
For example, when I first started at the USPTO in January 2017, it was still okay to list an ID for software in Class 09 as software as long as you included a bit more information about its functionality and purpose as well. As of January 2019, Class 09 software IDs are now required to specify whether the software is downloadable or recorded. This is meant to distinguish it from Class 42 non-downloadable software services.
Anyway, if you had filed an application for “software for counting cats” in Class 09 in December 2018 before the requirements changed, the USPTO wouldn’t make you add in the word “downloadable” later, as your ID was acceptable at the time you filed the application. The updated ID requirements had an effective date /after/ you filed your application, so you aren’t held to those standards. However, if you filed such an application now, you’d definitely have to specify that it was “downloadable software for counting cats.”