The Trademark Fee Is Not What Makes It Expensive
There is no shortage of articles telling you what trademark registration costs in India. ₹4,500 per class for a DPIIT-recognised startup or an Udyam-registered MSME. ₹9,000 per class for everyone else. Ten-year validity. Renewable.
All true, and all beside the point.
In our experience, the founders who end up paying the most for trademark registration for startups are rarely the ones who misread the fee table. They’re the ones who got three decisions wrong before they ever reached the payment screen — and by the time the consequences surfaced, the cheap fix was no longer available.
Here are the three.
Mistake 1: Filing in the wrong name
The concessional fee — ₹4,500 instead of ₹9,000 per class — is not a discount on the mark. It’s a discount tied to who the applicant is.
An individual qualifies. A DPIIT-recognised startup qualifies. An Udyam-registered small enterprise qualifies. A private limited company with no Udyam registration does not — it pays the full ₹9,000 per class, even if the founder personally would have qualified had she filed in her own name.
So founders sometimes file personally, save the money, and feel clever about it.
Then the trademark sits in a founder’s individual name while the business, the revenue, the customers, and the goodwill all sit inside the company. That’s a problem waiting for a specific moment: a funding round, an acquisition, or a co-founder exit. An investor conducting diligence will want the company to own its own brand. If it doesn’t, you’re assigning the mark across — which means a deed, stamp duty, a Registry filing, delay, and legal fees that comfortably exceed whatever you saved.
The right sequence is boring: decide who should own the mark for the long term, get that entity the appropriate registration (Udyam or DPIIT) first, and then file. The concession is available to a properly registered company. Most founders simply file before doing the paperwork that would have qualified them.
Mistake 2: Choosing the class carelessly
India follows the Nice Classification — 45 classes, 1 to 34 for goods, 35 to 45 for services. You pay per class, per mark. You are protected only in the classes you actually filed in.
That last sentence is where the money goes.
A registered trademark in the wrong class is close to worthless against the competitor you actually care about. You hold a certificate; it doesn’t cover the thing they’re doing. And you don’t discover this at filing. You discover it eighteen months later, when someone launches with a confusingly similar name in the class you should have filed in, and your lawyer explains that your registration doesn’t reach them.
Two things make this harder than it looks:
Businesses straddle classes. A D2C brand selling a physical product and also running a retail platform is looking at goods and services. A software company may need Class 9 and Class 42 — and, depending on what its product actually does, possibly more. The class isn’t determined by what you call yourself; it’s determined by what you actually sell.
The classification changes. The Nice Classification is revised periodically, and the 13th edition took effect on 1 January 2026 with reshuffled headings and refined scope descriptions. Some businesses that previously sat comfortably in one class now straddle two. Advice from a 2023 blog post may quietly be wrong today.
Filing in the wrong class doesn’t just waste the fee — the fee is non-refundable. It also resets your priority date when you refile. In a market where somebody else may be building the same brand, months of lost priority is the expensive part.
Mistake 3: Filing too late
The most common version of this: a startup builds the brand for two years, gets some traction, starts spending on marketing, and then decides it’s time to protect the name.
By then, one of two things has usually happened.
Either someone else has filed a similar mark in the interim — in which case you are now the one facing an objection, arguing phonetic dissimilarity, and possibly rebranding a business that customers already recognise.
Or nobody has, and you got lucky.
Indian trademark practice gives weight to prior use, so building a brand isn’t worthless. But relying on it means proving your use with evidence, in a contested proceeding, against someone holding a registration. That is a far worse position than simply having filed first, and it costs considerably more than ₹4,500.
The moment to file is when you’ve settled on the name — not when the name has become valuable enough to be worth stealing.
What this actually looks like done properly
- A real clearance search — not just the free IP India database check, but a phonetic and conceptual search for marks close enough to trigger an objection under Sections 9 and 11.
- A decision on the applicant — company, founder, or LLP — made with the next three years in mind, and the Udyam or DPIIT registration obtained before filing if the concession matters.
- Class strategy — mapped to what the business actually sells and plausibly will sell, against the current edition of the classification.
- Word mark and device mark treated separately — these are two marks, and the fee applies to each. Protecting the name and the logo means deciding, deliberately, whether you need both.
- A calendar — examination responses have deadlines, and renewal comes round in ten years. A lapsed mark can be restored, but slowly and expensively, and your brand is exposed in the meantime.
Where we come in
Pratham HR & Legal Solutions is led by Pooja Nayar, a practising IPR attorney. We handle trademark and patent work for startups and SMEs across Chandigarh, Mohali, Delhi NCR, Noida, and Bengaluru — clearance searches, class strategy, filing, and objection responses — alongside the rest of the legal foundation a growing company needs.
If you’ve settled on your name and haven’t filed yet, that’s the conversation worth having now rather than in a year.
For a broader look at the legal foundation startups need beyond IP protection — including POSH compliance, HR policies, and employment contracts — see our guide on HR compliance for startups.