Patent Examiners' Salaries - June 1998

There are three primary pay systems used by the Patent and Trademark Office because of its status as an agency of the US Department of Commerce: Senior Executive Service (SES) - management, General Schedule (GS) - examiners, and Wage Grade/Board (WG ...) - everyone else.

Under the GS schedule for examiners, there are major pay levels called "Grades", with graduations in each grade called "Steps". New employees usually start at the lower grades, first step. There is a defined minimum "waiting period" before a GS employee can advance from the highest Step of one Grade to the lowest Step of the next Grade.

Typically (or at least according to a poorly worded PTO memo), it takes about a year to be promoted from Step 1 to Step 4, another year to be promoted from Step 4 to Step 7, and another year to be promoted from Step 7 to Step 10. Thus a typical examiner will spend about three years in any one Grade.

Typically examiners work 40 hour weeks, though the PTO has provisions for Flextime and Compressed Weeks (for example working 10 hours for 4 days). Extra pay is provided for overtime, and working on holidays or Sunday.

In any event, all of these details are irrelevant. Examiners' salaries should be twice as high as those listed below. It is silly to have corporate inventors in high tech fields like biotechnology and computing with $100,000+ salaries being assisted by patent lawyers making $100,000+ salaries having their patent applications being examiners by examiners making half as much money ($35,000 to $65,000). I have less than full confidence in examiners accepting such pay who actually know their stuff, when they could walk across Jefferson Davis Highway and make twice as much in a law firm or a high tech company.