An examining attorney now has your file
Official wording: New Application - Assigned to Examiner.
Your application has been assigned to an examining attorney at the USPTO and substantive review has started. Nothing is required from you and no deadline is running — but the next thing that happens may start one.
What actually changed
Until now your application sat in a queue. A named examining attorney is now responsible for it and will review the mark itself: whether it conflicts with an existing registration, whether the goods and services are worded acceptably, whether your specimen shows real use. This is the first time a person has looked at the substance of what you filed.
There is nothing to answer yet
No deadline attaches to 638. You do not need to file anything, confirm anything, or contact the examiner. Applicants who write to the office at this stage do not move faster; the file moves when the examination is done.
Check the email on your record today
This is the last quiet moment before something arrives. USPTO correspondence goes to the email address of record, and the next document may be an office action with a response deadline attached. If that address is stale — an old agency, a former employee, a mailbox nobody opens — the first you hear of the problem can be an abandonment notice months later.
Two things can come next
Either the examiner approves the mark for publication, which shows as 680, or raises an objection and mails an office action, which shows as 641 and does start a clock. A large share of applications receive at least one office action, so getting one does not mean the filing was wrong.
What is worth doing while you wait
The risk during examination is not the USPTO. It is everything outside it: someone adopting a similar name, a marketplace listing copying your branding, a domain or handle being taken while your application is still pending. These are the months in which that tends to happen unnoticed.
Confirm this against your own record
Status code descriptions are administered inside USPTO systems and published wording varies slightly between sources. Your file is the authority. Enter your serial number in TSDR to see your current status, every document filed, and any live deadline.
Open TSDRLooking this up for a client rather than for your own mark? We keep a network of licensed attorneys who review the cases that come through us. It is case-by-case paid work and a free listing — never a referral fee or a cut of anything.