An amendment to the Korean Patent Act passed the National Assembly on August 20, 2026, relaxing the requirement for restoring a patent application or patent right that has lapsed for non-payment of patent fees, by shifting from a "justifiable reason" standard to an "unintentional" standard, and extending the period for seeking restoration to one year from the expiry of the six-month grace period.  The amendment will take effect six months after promulgation.  Like amendments are to be effectuated in the Design Protection Act and the Utility Model Act.  The salient features of the changes are summarized below.

▶ Background 

This is the second liberalization of the patent restoration requirement in four years.  Until April 2022, in order to restore a lapsed patent or application, it was necessary to show that the failure to pay the official fee was due to a cause not attributable to the applicant or patentee.  An amendment effective April 20, 2022, replaced that test with a justifiable reason standard, intended as a measure to provide relief for patentees' inadvertent mistakes.  In practice, however, "justifiable reason" was read as asking whether the party had exercised due care, and relief remained correspondingly rare.  The data compiled by the Ministry of Intellectual Property ("MOIP") indicates that, of the restoration requests filed between April 2022 and December 2025, only 15.6% were successful.  The amendment now passed removes the due care inquiry altogether and asks only whether the omission was intentional.

The official fee in question covers both the registration fee payable for the first three years of the term before the patent is registered and the annual fees payable from the fourth year onward.  Non-payment of the former causes the application to be abandoned; non-payment of the latter extinguishes the patent.  Either may still be paid within six months of the due date on payment of a surcharge, that period being the "grace period."  It is only after the grace period has run that the restoration provisions come into play.

▶ Summary of the Changes 

▶ Relaxed Requirement and Extended Period

Restoration is now available unless the failure to pay was intentional.  Intentionality operates as an exception rather than as a matter the right holder must disprove, and the applicant or patentee is no longer required to show that it exercised due care.  The one-year period runs from a fixed calendar date, ascertainable at the time the grace period expires and readily docketed.

The procedural architecture changes as well.  The existing paragraph (3), which allowed restoration within three months of the expiry of the grace period upon payment of twice the fee with no showing required at all, is deleted, leaving a single procedure.  Restoration also becomes a matter of applying for relief. Under the existing provision, the applicant or patentee simply paid the fee, and payment was deemed to avert the abandonment or extinction; under the amendment, the party pays the prescribed amount and requests restoration.  What that request will have to contain is left to the Prime Ministerial Decree to be issued, and whether a statement of unintentional delay will suffice, as it does before the USPTO and the JPO, is yet to be settled.

▶ Scope and Effect of Restoration

Restoration reaches abandoned applications as well as extinguished patents, as it did before the amendment under paragraph (1) of the provision.  The deleted paragraph (3), which dispensed with any showing, had been open only to extinguished patents; consolidating the two procedures into one removes the difference in treatment between an abandoned application and an extinguished patent.

The scope of the provision nevertheless remains limited. What is restorable is an application or right lost through failure to pay the patent fee within the grace period.  In the case of an application, this means an application on which a decision to grant has issued and which was then abandoned at the registration-fee stage.  Other prosecution deadlines, including the request for examination and the priority period, are not affected.

As for third parties, the relevant provisions are carried over almost verbatim, but their reach expands together with the restoration period.  The effect-limitation period, which operates much like intervening rights in other systems, runs from the expiry of the grace period until the day the prescribed amount is paid, and a third party working the invention in good faith during that period acquires a non-exclusive license.  That period previously ran for a matter of months, and it may now run for more than a year.

▶ Effective Date and Transitional Rule

The amendment takes effect six months after promulgation, and applies to cases in which the grace period expires on or after the effective date.  The operative date is the expiry of the grace period, rather than the date on which the fee originally fell due, to which the lapse is backdated, or the date on which restoration is sought.  Cases in which the grace period expired earlier remain subject to the justifiable reason standard and its two-month window for up to a year after the amendment takes effect.  Parties with an imminent or recently missed Korean patent fee deadline should confirm whether the relevant grace period expires before or after the effective date, as this single fact determines which standard applies.

▶ Implications

The amendments align Korea with the unintentionality standard applied in the US and Japan, and are the first of the legislative steps required for Korean accession to the Patent Law Treaty, which the MOIP is targeting for 2029.  Further bills are expected in the second half of 2026, including a mechanism for restoring the right of priority where the twelve-month period has been missed.