Paints, varnishes, stains, or colorants that protect or coat surfaces.
The USPTO sorts every product and service into one of 45 international classes. A trademark is registered class by class, for what you actually sell, which is why the same word can be registered by different owners in different classes. Class 2 is the class for paints, varnishes, stains, or colorants that protect or coat surfaces.
Common goods in this class:
The USPTO keeps a list of descriptions it has already accepted, called the Trademark ID Manual. It holds 735 for class 2, and these are the ones that match what businesses in this class most often sell. Every line below is the USPTO's exact wording. If you describe your goods in the manual's words, the description is already approved, which is the easiest way to avoid an objection to it.
Paints, varnishes and colorants. Paint for artists and pigments are both here, which surprises people who expect art supplies to sit together: it is the paint brushes that are Class 16.
A business in class 2 often needs these classes too, or finds its goods mistaken for theirs. This is our own reading of how businesses file, not an official USPTO list.
The class is not a category you choose for convenience. It follows from the identification of goods you write, and that description is what your registration actually covers. Write it too narrowly and you protect less than you meant to. Write it too broadly and you have a different problem, because you must really be using the mark on everything you list.
The USPTO charges its filing fee for each class, so every extra class adds to the cost. The fees change from time to time, so check the current schedule on uspto.gov rather than trusting a number on a blog, including ours.
Picking the class is the easy half. The harder half is whether someone already holds a similar mark for related goods. An examiner can refuse a mark that only resembles an earlier one. It does not have to be an exact match.
This is where the class number misleads people most. Relatedness is judged on what the identifications actually say, not on whether two marks sit in the same class. Genuinely related goods are routinely split across classes, and a single class often holds goods that have nothing to do with each other. A search that looks only inside class 2 can miss conflicts that an examiner would find. Two of our guides explain how that judgment is made: the different-industry question and how similar is too similar.
Class 2 is the international (Nice) class for paints, varnishes, stains, or colorants that protect or coat surfaces. It is one of 45 classes, and a U.S. trademark application has to name the class or classes that match what you actually sell.
Typical goods include house, industrial paint, wood stains, varnish, anti-rust coatings and printing inks. The USPTO lists 735 accepted descriptions for this class in its Trademark ID Manual, and the examples on this page come from that list.
The USPTO charges its filing fee for each class, so two classes cost twice as much as one. Fees change, so check the current fee schedule on uspto.gov rather than a figure quoted anywhere else.
Often, yes. You file in every class that matches what you actually sell. You cannot add a class just for extra protection, because you have to be using the mark in every class you claim.
Each of these is a thing the USPTO's own manual puts in Class 2, with the accepted descriptions behind it.