No, it is not refundable. After a trademark registration application is refused, the official fee already paid (the trademark registration acceptance fee) will not be refunded. Whether the refusal is total or partial, the official fee is not returned.
Why It Is Not Refundable
The legal nature of the official fee is a charge for examination services, not consideration for successful registration. The CNIPA has already completed all examination work on the application — formality examination, substantive examination, and preparing and serving the refusal notice — so the service has been rendered and the fee is not returned. This is consistent with the fee systems for patents and trademarks in most countries.
Refund Rules for Fees at Each Stage
- Official fee for the registration application: not refunded upon refusal; where an application is voluntarily withdrawn before acceptance and has not entered examination, a refund may be applied for under relevant rules in isolated cases, but once substantive examination begins the fee is never refunded;
- Official fee for a refusal review: once paid, it is not refunded regardless of the review outcome, and is not refunded even if the review application is withdrawn midway;
- Partial refusal: the approved portion and the refused portion belong to the same class; official fees are charged per class, so there is no per-item refund.
Are Agency Fees Refundable?
Agency service fees depend on the engagement contract. Some agencies in the market offer guarantee packages such as "refund upon refusal" or "free review"; such clauses usually carry strict conditions (e.g., limited to specific refusal grounds), so read each exemption clause carefully before signing.
More Practical Advice
Since the fees cannot be recovered, what deserves more attention is minimizing refusal risk before filing:
- Conduct a comprehensive prior-trademark search and registrability assessment before filing;
- Avoid the prohibited signs and distinctiveness minefields;
- For multi-class applications, proceed in batches and validate the risk in the core class first.
The cost of a pre-filing assessment is far lower than the loss from a subsequent refusal.
Note: the fee figures in this article are updated as of 2026; if official or service fees are adjusted, the latest public notices of the CNIPA and the service provider shall prevail.
If you are facing the issues above, you can first run a trademark registration assessment on MyTMBee to confirm feasibility before deciding whether to file, avoiding wasted official fees from blind filings.