Most people meet trademark classes as a dropdown on a form, somewhere between their address and their credit card. It looks like paperwork. It is actually the part of the application that decides what you end up owning.
A trademark is for a word on particular goods
You cannot register a word in the abstract. You register it for specific goods or services, written out in the application, and your rights are built around that description. This is why the same name can belong to different owners at the same time. An airline and a faucet maker can share a name because nobody buying a faucet wonders whether the airline made it.
To keep millions of registrations organized, every product and service is sorted into one of 45 international classes. Classes 1 to 34 are goods and classes 35 to 45 are services. The United States uses the same system as most of the world.
Why the class matters more than it looks
It sets what you own. Your registration protects the mark for what you listed, in the class you listed it. Describe too little and you have protected less than you thought.
It sets what you pay. The USPTO charges its filing fee for each class, so two classes cost twice as much as one. Fees change, so check the current schedule on uspto.gov rather than a number in a blog post, including this one.
You can narrow it later, but you cannot widen it. After filing, you are allowed to clarify or cut down your description. You are not allowed to add things that were never in it. If you left out half of what you sell, the fix is a new application.
You have to actually use it. A class is not a fence you can put up around territory you might want one day. You need to be using the mark on the goods you claim, in every class you claim.
The splits that catch people
The most common mistake has one shape: the thing you make is in one class, and the service of selling or serving it is in another. All of the examples below come straight from the USPTO's own list of accepted descriptions.
- Clothing. T-shirts are Class 25. Retail store services, including an online store, are Class 35. A brand that makes and sells its own line usually needs both.
- Software. Downloadable software is Class 9. Software as a service is Class 42. Many software companies are in both without realizing it.
- Coffee. Roasted coffee is Class 30. Cafe services are Class 43. A roaster that opens a cafe has crossed into a second class.
Other lines are drawn in places you would not guess:
- Electricity. Electric kettles are Class 11. Non-electric kettles are Class 21.
- Candles. Candles are Class 4, alongside fuels, because they burn. Candle holders are Class 21.
- Straps. Watch straps are Class 14 with jewelry. Smartwatch straps are Class 9 with electronics.
- Frozen pizza is Class 30 with bread and baked goods, even though frozen vegetables are Class 29.
- Kombucha is Class 30 as well, because it is a tea. Most people expect it with soft drinks in Class 32.
- Wheelchairs are Class 12, with vehicles. People look for them with medical devices in Class 10.
None of these is obvious, and that is the point. The class system was built by committee over a century, and guessing at it is how applications go wrong.
The right class does not mean the name is free
This is the misunderstanding that costs the most. People find an identical name registered in a different class and conclude they are safe. They may not be.
An examining attorney refuses a mark that resembles an earlier one for related goods, and relatedness is judged on what the goods actually are, not on the class numbers. Related goods are routinely split across classes, as the clothing and coffee examples above show. A clothing brand and a clothing store are in different classes and are about as related as two businesses can be. The different-industry question covers how that judgment works.
How to find your class
Start from what you sell, not from the list of 45. Describe it in plain words, then look for the USPTO's own wording for it. The office publishes a list of descriptions it has already accepted, called the Trademark ID Manual. Wording from that list is pre-approved, and each entry comes with its class, so finding your wording settles your class at the same time.
We built a free tool that does exactly this. Type what you sell into the class finder and it searches the manual's 64,000 accepted descriptions and shows you which classes they fall in. If you would rather browse, all 45 classes are listed here, each with real accepted descriptions and the mistake people most often make with it.
Once you know your class, the next question is the one that actually decides things: whether someone already holds a similar name for related goods. See how to check whether a name is already trademarked.