TESS was retired. This is where the search moved.
The USPTO switched off TESS — the Trademark Electronic Search System — in 2023 and replaced it with a cloud-based search at tmsearch.uspto.gov. Same register, different system. If a guide, a course or a colleague sent you to TESS, that instruction was right once and is out of date now.
Nothing you were trying to look up has gone away
The federal register of registered and pending US trademarks is still public, still free to search, and still needs no account. Only the search interface changed. If you need the status of one specific application instead, that lives in TSDR, which is a different system and was not retired.
The three systems people mix up.
Most of the confusion around the TESS retirement is really confusion between searching the register, tracking one file, and looking up design codes. They were always separate.
Was TESS, now tmsearch
Finding whether a mark resembling yours is registered or pending. tmsearch.uspto.gov is the replacement, and the planner below builds the searches worth running on it.
TSDR, unchanged
Status, documents and prosecution history for a serial or registration number you already have. Not affected by the TESS retirement. If the status is a bare number, our status code library translates it.
Design codes, separate again
A word search finds words. A design that resembles your logo is found through numeric design codes, which the USPTO maintains in its own design code manual.
A new search box does not fix the old mistake.
Which system you use changes almost nothing about whether your search is any good. The thing that decides that is what you type in. TESS and its replacement will both cheerfully return nothing at all for a name that is about to be refused, because the USPTO can refuse a mark that merely resembles one already registered — and almost everybody searches their own spelling and stops there.
A search worth running covers the exact name, the spellings that sound like it, the distinctive stem rather than the whole word, and the specific classes covering what you sell. Our trademark search planner builds that list for a name in a few seconds and hands it to you to run on the USPTO's system. It holds no copy of the register and returns no verdict about your name — it tells you what to search, which is the part people get wrong.
Source for the system change: USPTO, trademark search system updates. General information about USPTO systems and procedure, not legal advice. We are not a law firm and we are not affiliated with the USPTO.
You are probably not who the rest of this page is for.
People who know TESS by name are often paralegals, trademark administrators and attorneys rather than first-time filers, and there is no point selling a filing service to someone who files for a living. Two things that may be more use: our status code library reproduces the USPTO's published code table with plain-English explanations and is built to be linked to, and we keep a network of licensed attorneys who review the cases that come through us. Attorneys in the network are never offered a referral fee or a cut of anything — it is case-by-case paid work and a free listing, which is the only arrangement we think is defensible.
Asked and answered.
Is TESS still available?
No. The USPTO retired TESS, the Trademark Electronic Search System, in 2023 and replaced it with a cloud-based trademark search system at tmsearch.uspto.gov. The old TESS interface is no longer the way to search the federal register.
Why do so many guides still say to use TESS?
Because TESS was the only way to search the US register for roughly two decades, so it is written into textbooks, university course materials, law-firm explainers, government-adjacent guides and a great many blog posts that have not been updated. If you were told to use TESS, the instruction was correct when it was written and is simply out of date now.
What replaced TESS?
A browser-based search system at tmsearch.uspto.gov, searching the same federal register of registered and pending trademarks. It is free and needs no account, exactly as TESS was. The USPTO publishes its own notes on the change on its trademark search system updates page.
Do my old TESS searches still work?
Treat them as a starting point rather than something to paste across. The register being searched is the same, but the interface and the query behaviour are not identical, so a search string written for TESS will not necessarily behave the same way. The safer approach is to rebuild the search from what you are actually trying to find - the exact mark, the spellings that sound like it, the stem, and the classes that matter.
Is the new USPTO trademark search free?
Yes. Searching the register on the USPTO's own system costs nothing and needs no account, as TESS did. Anyone charging purely for access to the register is charging for convenience or for interpretation, not for the lookup itself.
Where do I check the status of one specific application?
A search system finds marks; it is not where you track one file. For a specific application or registration you already have a serial or registration number for, the record lives in TSDR, the USPTO's status system. That is also where the document that set your deadline can be read.