On December 16, 2025, the European Patent Office (EPO) officially issued the "Revised Notice on the Programme for Accelerated Prosecution of European Patent Applications (PACE)", announcing significant adjustments to the PACE mechanism that has been in operation for more than a decade. Under the new rules, as of February 1, 2026, the PACE accelerated service will be limited to the substantive examination phase of patents and will no longer cover the search phase.

For Chinese enterprises deploying in the European market, the PACE (Programme for Accelerated Prosecution of European Patent Applications) has long been a key tool to break through the bottleneck of the European patent examination cycle. Restricted by the overall early examination efficiency of the EPO, the program previously allowed applicants to submit acceleration requests separately during the search and substantive examination phases. With the continuous improvement of the EPO's examination efficiency, it can now stably complete extended or partial search reports for European patent applications (including PCT European phase cases where the EPO is not the International Searching Authority) within 6 months. In 2024, this cycle was further shortened to an average of 5.5 months.

The original PACE program permitted applicants to submit one acceleration request each during the dual phases of search and substantive examination. Now, based on the significant improvement in search efficiency, the EPO has decided to optimize the process: as of February 1, 2026, the PACE accelerated service will fully withdraw from the search phase, retaining only the acceleration function for the substantive examination phase.

It is particularly important to note that this revision does not involve changes to other rules, and the existing program provisions remain in effect. The new rules will officially take effect on February 1, 2026, and will only apply to PACE acceleration requests submitted on or after that date.