IP Australia goes the eXtra mile: IP Australia joins the PPH eXtra initiative

On 1 June 2026, IP Australia became the eighth patent office in the world — and the first in our region — to implement the PPH eXtra Initiative, a transparency program that lifts the lid on how quickly patent offices actually process fast-tracked examination requests. For Australian applicants and foreign filers alike, the data released alongside the announcement contains a genuinely striking headline: IP Australia is, by a comfortable margin, the fastest office in the group.

Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH)

The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is an international examination cooperation scheme operated under bilateral (and multilateral "Global PPH") agreements between participating intellectual property offices. In essence, it is a global fast-track means for patent prosecution, where a corresponding application has already been found to contain at least one allowable or patentable claim by one participating office, the applicant may request accelerated examination of their application before another participating office, which can leverage the earlier office's examination work.

The benefits are well established. By reusing search and examination results rather than starting from scratch, the PPH typically delivers faster prosecution, higher grant rates and reduced overall costs for applicants while simultaneously easing workload duplication across offices.

PPH eXtra Initiative

For all its advantages, the PPH has historically had a blind spot. Applicants requesting accelerated examination often had little visibility of how fast "accelerated" would actually be in any given jurisdiction.

PPH eXtra, formally known as the "PPH Improvement Initiative", was created to fix this. Launched in 2022 by the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) and United States Patent and Trademark Office, it is a self-initiated commitment by participating offices to make examination timing for PPH applications predictable and publicly measurable. Implementing offices are obliged to:

1. set and publicly share target average pendencies for: (a) the time from a PPH request to the first office action; and (b) the time from an applicant's response to any subsequent office action; and
2. publicly disclose their actual average pendencies against those targets, reported annually.

Membership has grown steadily. After the founding JPO–USPTO pair, the Austrian Patent Office joined in July 2025, Finland’s Patent and Registration office in December 2025, and the Israel Patent Office in January 2026. In addition, China's China National Intellectual Property Administration, South Korea’s Ministry of Intellectual Property, and IP Australia joined the initiative in June 2026, bringing the group to eight offices.

The core purpose of PPH eXtra is informed decision-making. With comparable, annually published pendency data across eight major offices, applicants and their attorneys can plan international prosecution sequencing with real numbers rather than anecdote — deciding where to seek an early allowance and where to deploy PPH requests to cascade that result most efficiently.

For patentees with an allowable claim in any corresponding application before a PPH partner office, the case for requesting PPH examination in Australia is now stronger and better evidenced than ever.