Telecommunications like phone, internet access, or messaging services.
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 38 is the class for telecommunications like phone, internet access, or messaging services.
Common services in this class:
The USPTO keeps a list of descriptions it has already accepted, called the Trademark ID Manual. It holds 510 for class 38, 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 services in the manual's words, the description is already approved, which is the easiest way to avoid an objection to it.
Telecommunications: the service of carrying messages and streams from one place to another. The devices it runs over are goods, so telephones are Class 9.
A business in class 38 often needs these classes too, or finds its services 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 services 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 services. 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 services are routinely split across classes, and a single class often holds services that have nothing to do with each other. A search that looks only inside class 38 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 38 is the international (Nice) class for telecommunications like phone, internet access, or messaging services. 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 services include internet access, phone service, streaming transmission, messaging, chat and broadcasting. The USPTO lists 510 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 38, with the accepted descriptions behind it.